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Comment by throwawaymaths | Hacker News Reader

i mean isnt all this stuff up to the mcp author to return a reasonable error to the agent and ask for it to repeat the call with amendments to the json?

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Yes. And this is where culture comes in. The culture of discipline of the C++ and the JavaScript communities are at extreme odds of the spectrum. The concern here is that the culture of interfacing with AI tools, such as MCP, is far closer to the discipline of the JavaScript community than to the C++ community.

The fundamental difference is the JS community believe in finding the happy path that results in something they can sell before they have filled in all those annoying problem areas around it.

If an LLM can be shown to be useful 80% of the time to the JS mindset this is fine, and the remaining 20% can be resolved once we're being paid for the rest, Pareto principle be damned.

> i mean isnt all this stuff up to the mcp author

Mostly, no. Whether its the client sending (statically) bad data or the server returning (statically) bad data, schema validation on the other end (assuming somehow it is allowed by the toolchain on the sending end) should reject it before it gets to the custom code of the MCP server or MCP client.

For arguments that are the right type but wrong because of the state of the universe, yes, the server receiving it should send a useful error message back to the client. But that's a different issue.

This is no different than the argument that C is totally great as long as you just don’t make mistakes with pointers or memory management or indexing arrays.

At some point we have to decide as a community of engineers that we have to stop building tools that are little more than loaded shotguns pointed at our own feet.

no, it's not because the nature of llms mean that even if you fully validate your communications with the llm statistically anything can happen, so any usage/threat model must already take nasal demons into account.

Adding new and innovative layers of unsafety on top doesn’t invalidate the need for safety in lower layers. If anything it makes it more critical.

you're missing the point. the point is, there is no need to make two layers out of one (i could be persuaded that it makes the coding easier)

It's clearly a much better design if the shotguns are pointed at someone else's feet.

This implies that the input process did a check when it imported the data from somewhere else.

GIEMGO garbage in even more garbage out

What's your point? It's up to a ship's captain to keep it afloat, doesn't mean the hundreds of holes in the new ship's hull aren't relevant.

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