Hacker News Reader

Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

> You forgot mcp-everything!

One great thing about the MCP craze, is it has given vendors a motivation to expose APIs which they didn’t offer before - real example, Notion’s public REST API lacks support for duplicating pages.. yes their web UI can do it, calling their private REST API, but their private APIs are complex, undocumented, and could stop working at any time with no notice. Then they added it to their MCP server - and MCP is just a JSON-RPC API, you aren’t limited to only invoking it from an LLM agent, you can also invoke it from your favourite scripting language with no LLM involved at all

View on HN

I remember reading in one of Simon Willison's recent blog posts his half-joking point that MCP got so much traction so fast because adding a remote MCP server allowed tech management at big companies whose C-suite is asking them for an "AI Strategy" to show that they were doing something. I'm sure that is a little bit true - a project framed as "make our API better and more open and well-documented" would likely never have got off the ground at many such places. But that is exactly what this is, really.

At least it's something we all reap the benefits of, even if MCP is really mostly just an api wrapper dressed up as "Advanced AI Technology."

Amazing example. AI turns the bedgrudging third rate API UX into a must-win agent UX

and we all win!

Well. I bet Notion simply forget some of APIs are private before. I started developing using Notion APIs on the first day it got released. They have constant updates and I have seen lots of improvement. There is just no reason why they intentionally want to make the duplicate page API on MCP but not api.

PS. Just want to say, Notion MCP is still very buggy. It can't handle code block, nor large page very well

> There is just no reason why they intentionally want to make the duplicate page API on MCP but not api.

I have no idea what is going on inside Notion, but if I guess - the web UI (including the private REST API which backs it), the public REST API, and the AI features are separate teams, separate PMs, separate budgets - so it is totally unsurprising they don’t all have the same feature set. Of course, if parity were an executive priority, they could get there-but I can only assume it isn’t.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com