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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read articles about MCP I feel like the internet (or HN) is having a collective stroke.

People are saying API are better than MCP. But MCP is just API with some instructions for the AI to discover how to use it. Nothing more nothing less. And some people are saying we should use 'CLI'... what does it even mean? LLMs are good with common CLI tools like ffmpeg because the knowledge is solidified inside the weights. If I make a new CLI tool I still need to somehow teach the AI to use it. If one wants the 'teaching' part comes from a server then MCP. If one wants it local and static then skills. How could there be so many debates around these simple concepts?

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My take is that most of the AI related posts are written by AI under instruction of people who hype it up but have no idea about how any of it works.

It all has some form of "the thing I'm doing is the future and everyone who doesn't join me will fall behind" energy that AI/NFT/blockchain/web3/etc. enthusiasts talk about when they're trying to sell you something or when they're trying to convince the world they really are the big money makers they claim to be.

The LLM isn't going to care about where the tokens it's inserting into the context window are coming from. For all it cares the data it's processing came in over fax and was read in with OCR.

i feel exactly the same its literally the only api standard that we truly made plug and play and even automatically oauth antenticathable with dcr and people are falling over it. also in an absolute record speed thousands of mcps.

cli’s also need to be documented and input/output typed.

its also extremly dsitributable by just pointing to an url.

cli’s are great because they are composable but i really got huge mileage out of mcps

>If one wants the 'teaching' part comes from a server then MCP. If one wants it local and static then skills

Not being facetious, but why not:

"If one wants the 'teaching' part comes from a server then OpenAPI specs. If one wants it local and static then man page."

Paradoxically, I've seen new CLI tools take on usage patterns from existing ones because of the idea of user familiarity. Even if the existing pattern sucked. I could see the same thing happening now under the idea that "the LLM already knows how to use X, so we should make our tool work like X"

Agreed, MCP works and it works well. Often I’ll wrap an API in an MCP because getting the agent to interact with an API just wastes tokens with it trailing things back and forth; MCPs just work.

I can't pipe an MCP's output to jq, and I can't ask an AI to write a python script to call an MCP.

sorry both of the things you said are false, why are they stated so confidently?

because being confidently incorrect is a thing?

I ... literally did both of these things last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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