Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

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So I’ve been working on a personal finance app, and I added an MCP to it. Connected my Claude to it, mainly for testing purposes.

The other day I was heading to Home Depot to buy some gardening stuff and I was asking some some questions around what I could plant at this time and still harvest before winter.

It answers me, then brings up how my home improvement budget is nearing its limit for the month. I then ask it how I’m doing on my wider retirement plan and it mentions I’m a few thousand dollars ahead of schedule for the plan. So I decided it’s okay to go over budget on that category this month.

This type of emergent behavior of agents you work with having more context about you, it’s very useful in ways I didn’t expect.

Is that really much different from building an API for your app though? Claude can use those just as easily.

MCP is essentially just a convention for APIs that standardizes the concept of a “resource”. It spares the LLM a lot of work figuring out what the “things” are in a problem domain, and how various endpoints relate to those “things”.

With authentication and on mobile?

I agree that on desktop it's not particularly relevant. Or through openclaw.

But for most people who use it through mobile, MCP solves some problems.

> With authentication and on mobile?

It's been a long time since I've used Claude, but is it not able to just use curl and an API key that it keeps in its "memory" on mobile? Or can it only use curl on the desktop?

I honestly don’t know if Claud can curl on mobile. I also haven’t had it try and store auth keys in memory.

Setting up an MCP connector took like 10 minutes for me, and it provides a nice little ui in Claude/chatgpt to make it easier for non-technical users to set up. I think of MCPs as a layer over APIs that makes things easier to interact with, similar to a frontend of a site.

Theoretically, no site needs a frontend. Yet they all do.

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