Ah, so the "I haven't needed it so it must be useless" argument.
There is huge value in having vendors standardize and simplifying their APIs instead of having agent users fix each one individually.
There is huge value in having vendors standardize and simplifying their APIs instead of having agent users fix each one individually.
Have the agents write code to use APIs? Code based tool calling has literally become a first party way to do tool calling.
We have a bunch of code accessible endpoints and tools with years of authentication handling etc built in.
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use#:~:t...
Feels like this obviates the need for MCP if this is becoming common.
Coding against every subtly different REST API is as annoying with agents as it is for humans. And it is good to force vendors to define which parts of the interface are actually important and clean them up. Or provide higher level tasks. Why would we ask every client to repeat that work?
There are also plenty of environments where having agents dynamically write and execute scripts is neither prudent nor efficient. Local MCP servers strike a governance balance in that scenario, and remote ones eliminate the need entirely.
I don't know that I really agree its as annoying for agents since they don't have the concept of annoyance and can trundle along infinitely fine.
While I appreciate the standardization I've often felt MCPs are a poor solution to a real problem that coincided with a need for good marketing and a desire to own mindspace here from Anthropic.
I've written a lot of agents now and when I've used MCP it has only made them more complicated for not an apparent benefit.
MCP's value lies in the social alignment of people agreeing to use it, it's technical merits seem dubious to me while its community merits seem high.
I can accept the latter and use it because of that while thinking there were other paths we probably should have chosen that make better use of 35 years of existing standards.
On runtime problems yes maybe we need standardisation.
Instructing people how to do that amounts to a standard in any case. Might as well specify the request format and authentication while you're at it.
if I want my api to work with an llm id create a spec with swagger. But why do I have to go with mcp? What is it adding additionally that didn’t exist in other spec?
I'm also willing to make an appeal to authority here (or at least competitive markets). If Anthropic was able to get Google and others on board with this thing, it probably does have merit beyond what else is available.
You could still use AI to implement the MCP server just like humans implemented Open AI for each other. Is it really surprising that we would need to refactor some architecture to work better with LLMs at this point? Clearly some big orgs have decided its worth the investment. You may not agree and that's fine - that happens with every type of new programming thing. But to compare generally against the "marketing hype" is basically just a straw man or nut picking.
Yes, and it's called OpenAPI.
90% of the endpoints are useless to an AI agent, and within the most important ones only 70% of the fields are relevant. The whole spec would consume a huge fraction of context tokens.
So at a minimum I need a new manifest with a highly pared down index.
I'm not claiming that we're not in this classic XKCD situation, but the point of the cartoon is that that just how it be... https://xkcd.com/927/
Maybe OpenAPI will be able to subsume MCP and those manifests can be generated from the same spec just like the SDKs themselves.