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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years.

They finally looked at how other protocols do things, and made something that behaves in recent versions. But it's hard as heck to take this company at all seriously. The don't really care about ecosystems (AGENTS.md), they don't seem to know think or care much about protocols until they have to (MCP's incredibly long redemption ark). The vibes are all off.

Maybe they avoid laying their own pitfalls this time. Maybe it's better. It'd be nice to start seeing some kind of cause to trust this company as vaguely capable computer-using people. But so far that hasn't been the case.

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I think they're doing this so they can have months of advanced notice of how the protocol will look, to post-train their models to be the only ones with the ability to interact with this protocol on the day it becomes public.

It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).

So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.

It's literally the "Worse is Better" approach at play here. Yes, same one that OSS and the industry love so much, the same received wisdom that gave us Unix and C, and 40 years of them catching up to what Lisp Machines to do. Talk about a redemption arc.

But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.

(The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)

I think I agree. I find it a little bit annoying that they do not start by a survey of the existing landscape, discuss the issues and what works well, and spend the effort to show that they can indeed to be trusted as the authority behind such a protocol expected to become standard. For MCP, it started very messy, but from what I understand it was developed by a small team within the company working on internal tooling, for their own use case, I think it’s reasonable to expect something a bit awkward, I don’t think they expected its success

MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years.

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but MCP was initially released in Nov 2024, so it hasn’t even been two years.

How long is that in AI-industry-years? Close to 8years maybe?!

It's a bit of both for Anthropic I think, sometimes cutting edge and quite interesting or just good improvements, sometimes ignoring best practices either recently established or known for decades. Obvious to see where the smart people are in high places at the company.

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