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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get it. I like MCP as an interface in general, but I don’t understand the use-case they present. For those of you here who like this idea, what is the killer use case?

To me, this looks less like UI interactions and more like the MCP equivalent of maintaining state. You start your program and “click” buttons until you get the desired result, maintaining a constant state between interactions. Isn’t that currently possible if you passed through something like a session-id back to the LLM?

Am I missing something? I’m struggling to see what a UI makes possible that the current workflow does not.

I also generally see/use MCP in terms of remote access to programs through servers. Perhaps that’s where I’m getting lost. Is this exclusively something for local MCP?

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This is the first wave of a new generation of Apps which has the potential to replace/enhance the majority of e-commerce websites.

I wouldn't underestimate it - it's the hammer can break up the information silos we've built up around websites/apps.

Why prompt Gertrude(tm) on Ramazon for a specific thing you need, if you can ask ChatGPT to find you said thing along with UIs to purchase it across all e-commerce platforms that agree to play in this market?

because the secret is that the web runs on advertising/targeted recommendations. Brezos(tm) wants you to actively browse Ramazon so he can harvest your data, search patterns etc. Amazon and most sites like that are very not crawl friendly for this reason. Why would Brezos let Saltman get all the juicy preference data?

> For those of you here who like this idea, what is the killer use case?

# 1

- Hey claude, recommend me next book I could read

- sure, what about '1984'? Here is a button to send it directly to your kindle, it will be $4,99.

# 2

- I am looking for the hotel for two in Viena this weekend

- here are some offers and still available (displays grid view generated by mcp ui, handled by booking.com, each item has a button to "book now" directly)

Thank you for this.

So, basically -- it's a method for the MCP Server to display a UI element to the user allowing the user to perform some kind of action. Current, this UI will be an HTML iframe.

I think I got confused by their barchart example. I thought this would have been just as easily supported by the MCP server sending back a PNG/PDF of a barchart for the main interface to display (I also generally think of barcharts as static content). But, the idea of adding specific user interaction elements (buttons) helps to make the concept more clear to me.

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