10,561 karma · joined March 7, 2011
Email me: matthew at matthewphillips.info
We're working on incremental builds which should help as well: https://github.com/withastro/roadmap/issues/1388
Of course anything is possible, I just don't think that people advocating for MCP's death have really thought through these problems, and are mostly focused on the desktop productivity use-cases.
The UX here isn't great, but let's assume it can be improved. How would auth work with this alternative method? I want to connect to Puma store and that's done using a skill with a CLI. Can the CLI launch your web browser to do oauth from the skill (on a phone)? And then the credentials are saved where?
Not challenging you, I'm open to alternatives to MCP for sure. But MCP seems way more mature especially for non-programming use-cases.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.
Also ultimately it was hard to sell the idea of living in a different file format from the rest of your code. This is always a tough sell for DSLs. Even languages as good as CSS and SQL struggle with this for a lot of devs.
What differentiates Astro DB is the deep integration with the Astro framework and providing an easy path for common scenarios. Astro DB is a higher-level product than using a database service directly. For example, Astro DB handles migrations transparently for you and guides you when manual intervention is needed, just from running `astro db push`.
Astro DB also includes a local story, by default you use a local SQLite database that you can seed (using db/seed.ts) for local development. You can even use it for a purely static site, although we're still working on making SSG use-cases more seamless. For now though, this gives you a great local workflow for development that you can think easily connect to production with `astro build --remote`.
I mean this:
> Want to do the supremely simple task of importing a JSON file?
Surely you realize that "importing JSON" is not something every project or page needs. By "all or nothing thinking" I mean the idea, which you expand in this response, that unless it supports everything it's not worth ever using. But that's a false dichotomy. A lot of projects are simple. A lot don't need all of these advanced bundler features. Those projects can (and do) use bare ESM in the browser. And that's ok.
To answer your question more directly, the reason they do it this way is because bundling dozens of features into a spec and then releasing them all at once has never worked in the history of web standards. For better or worse, doing one small thing at a time is what works.