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Comment by mikestorrent | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea. Like, if someone asked me to count the number of B's in your paragraph, I'd yeet it through `grep -o 'B' file.txt | wc -l` or similar, why would I sit there counting it by hand?

As a human, if you give me a number on screen like 100000000, I can't be totally sure if that's 100 Million or 1 Billion without getting close and counting carefully. Should ought have my glasses. Mouse pointer helps some as an ersatz thousands-separator, but still.

Since we're giving them tools, especially for math, it makes way more sense to start giving them access to some of the finest tools ever. Make an MCP into Mathematica or Matlab and let the LLM write some math and have classical solvers actually deal with the results. Let the LLM write little bits of bash or python as its primary approach for dealing with these kinds of analytical questions.

It's like giving a kid a calculator...

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If you have to build an MCP for every system you aren’t building intelligence in the first place.

You don't need specialised MCPs for this. In the past you could add "use python" to there chatgpt prompt and it would do the right thing. This is exactly the intelligent "use the right tool for the right thing" idea. Chatgpt just want trained to apply it in the right circumstances automatically.

Why? just cause? analogize it to the human brain.

Why does it matter? I don't care whether it's intelligent, I just need it to be useful. In order to be useful it needs to start fucking up less, stat. In current form it's borderline useless.

Fair criticism, but also this arguably would be preferable. For many use cases it would be strictly better, as you've built some sort of automated drone that can do lots of work but without preferences and personality.

I think a piece of software that can correctly decide what oracle to consult to get answers to questions you give it can be called intelligent, even if it itself doesn’t know any facts.

What if MCP servers were really the neurons we were looking for all along? /s

We have fingers and a keyboard / mouse, because that's the best thing we've come up with. If we could output binary to a bunch of program interfaces directly (perhaps via some neuralink type thing) we would surely take that option.

> As a human, if you give me a number on screen like 100000000, I can't be totally sure if that's 100 Million or 1 Billion without getting close and counting carefully.

I become mildly infuriated when computers show metrics (or any large number) without thousands separators.

Worse still, I often see systems that mix units, don’t right-align, and occasionally blend in a few numbers with decimals together with whole numbers! Then, update everything every second to make things extra spicy.

Right. So if we have these kinds of cognitive blindness and just accept it as status quo, and when necessary we make up for it with tooling... it's not unreasonable to assume that AI will also have to do this

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