willio58

The crazy thing with the anti-MCP wave to me could be boiled down to "you don't like it? Then don't use it."

It's like people hate it so much they forget how easy it is to spin one of these up; it's not like I spent weeks and weeks working on this.

I spun up an MCP server for a personal finance app I've been working on. OAuth with personal tokens and all the tools I added- guess how long it took me? Like 2 hours maybe. Some people find it useful, including me, and some don't. That's okay!

Great consideration to make, those rule sets should absolutely require at least a confirmation from a human to change.

Absolutely, I could touch on that in the article more.

I mean, that post says basically nothing of substance, compared to the post linked by OP.

That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.

After a long day at work I saw the page, saw the warning to not click it, and I proceeded to click it lol.

Locked up my entire M1 Macbook Pro, held power button and I was back into chrome in <20s but I did kinda go "why did I just do that?"

I love this. Thanks for sharing!

This is absolutely true.

The vast majority of devs pre-ai clocked in, wrote mediocre or even bad code, and clocked out. Those same people at least have a coding buddy with a bar of quality set at least as high as what they'd normally write, and simple prompts of "any security considerations I'm missing?" can take it to the next level.

If you work on a team of devs who truly care about code quality, you should thank the people in charge of hiring. Odds are they culled hundreds of mediocre applicants to get to the people you work with.

By the way, I'm not bashing on those that clock in, do the bare minimum, and clock out. Even those devs generally produce more value from their labor than what the company compensates them for, so it's still a money printing machine for execs.

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.

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.

Bro really said Grok

I thought I loved writing code. Turns out I like building shit. Why take a week to build something I can build in a day?

I still like reviewing code, but I don’t need to physically write it

> You've already condemned people without access to any good evidence.

And the live-streamed genocide that the world has watched over the past 3 years doesn't qualify as evidence? That's odd because I could have sworn the United Nations, The International Association of Genocide Scholars, B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and Human Rights Watch had all labeled Israel's actions against Palestinians as genocide.

America's evidence against that? Israel says so.

> US defense requires the ability to do everything Israel did against Gaza

Since when does defence require killing innocent women and children indiscriminately? At what point does that sort of defence reach a level of inhumanity that you're willing to concede that it's genocidal?

As a Jewish man following true Jewish morals, I will stand by the statements of these international bodies that find Israel and its leaders guilty of committing genocide. Never again cannot mean only for jews; it can only be morally just when applied to everyone.

> Those sanctions were issued in retaliation for ICC investigations into US personnel in Afghanistan and for warrants the court issued against top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Oh no! An international body is taking action against some of the worst criminals on the planet? I'm glad the U.S. is taking actions to prevent those people from doing their job. America is doing great!

God that's sad. I almost feel bad for all the engineers there, though I'm sure they made good money and probably left

I've been building a smart personal finance app with AI integration and I've heard great feedback from my first users. I had a friend ask me a financial advice question the other day and I directed him to use the chat interface in the app, it gave him a better answer than I could and gave it to him with context of all of his financials. This stuff is the future of personal finance.

> It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.

Fully agreed. It's also just a time saver. People are lazy, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just that people don't really want to sit there and explain to an agent exactly what they want software to function like. In fact, most people don't even actually know what they want software to function like.

It doesn't just stop at humans either. When I recently started creating my smart budgeting app, Claude pointed me to use Clerk for auth. So not even the AI wants to build everything from scratch.

> But the corollary, which the article doesn't really acknowledge, is that reforms like credit card interest caps and the Credit Card Competition Act would substantially limit consumer access to credit.

That's a good point, and of course there are downstream affects of this, but I wonder if that's a bad thing. We're not talking about reduction in ability to access say mortgage debt or something of that nature, we're talking credit card debt. Making it possible for a person to be in $10k, $20k, $40k+ in extremely high interest credit card debt doesn't seem like a positive for our economy overall to me. It really just masks the root of the problem, which is that people are working paycheck to paycheck and can't afford the occasional emergency.

Author here! I promise I didn't use Claude for any of this. I will admit I'm working on developing a "voice" in my writing, so maybe that's what you're sensing. Thanks for the read anyway.

Is there an example in your eyes that proves this wrong?

>It pales compared to the $3,000 a year in interest towards the national debt I'm responsible for.

Thinking of country-scale finances in the same way you think about personal finance is wrong in many ways. Take debt for example. As an individual, it's arguably best not to have debt at all. As a country, sovereign debt is the foundation of the world's money supply and fuels continuous economic growth.

Also, though the U.S. has $31 Trillion dollars of debt, $22 Trillion of that belongs to U.S. domestic traders.

If we were to cut our debt down to zero, we'd cripple ourselves with taxes and stifle growth. We'd have zero debt but we'd be sent into a massive economic depression, and that would likely ripple out across the planet.

> And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.

Myself and 2 of my friends stopped our subscriptions the day that happened and never went back. I know it’s anecdotal but I’m happy to see others did the same.

And just like that you’ve done more due diligence than the VCs who just threw money at this.

CEOs do get there with lots of politics in almost all cases. It’s all about who’s ass you kiss and who’s ass you don’t and if you’re lucky with timing things might just fall into place.

I think it’s exceedingly rare that a CEO is actually competent at their job. In most cases it’s the labor class propping the company up, and in some cases the workers are doing so against the wishes of the CEO. Not that executives want to ruin the company, they’re just incompetent and therefore make terrible decisions constantly.

It’s already irreversible, but it’s just disappointing to see how the U.S. administration has chosen to actively fight against it, while other countries like China are embracing reality.

It’s actually funny if you don’t think about it too hard. The U.S. president is trying to make us more reliant on fossil fuels, while starting a war in Iran that’s led to the global fossil fuel market to be negatively impacted, forcing most Americans to pay more for fossil fuels. Who could have seen that coming? We’re doing great!

I hate ads to the point I either pay or use other means to avoid ads in basically everything I use

- NPR (I pay, happy to support)

- Podcasts (I skip ads, using a client that supports that)

- Movies/TV/Music (I self-host, thank you open source community!)

- Twitch (I pay 1 creator 6$/mo and must watch 40+ hours per month)

I don’t have mainline social media downloaded on my phone, I sometimes visit reddit.com and see the ads that aren’t blocked by ad block but I find myself visiting less often recently anyway.

All of this to say, pay a bit and put in some work and you can avoid 95% of ads

Admittedly, I’ve gone through waves of feeling scared for the future of software engineering. I manage many people so I care about them and their futures. But the more I use AI in writing software, not just vibe coding, the more I align with this perspective. And the way I see it, when AGI does come it’s going to affect a whole lot more than the software engineering job market. That’s global societal-level impact type stuff. We’d have to reckon with if work (meaning a 9 to 5) is truly a requirement to thrive in life. Spoiler, it isn’t.

Thanks for the answer! I do see both sides

> Using existing CLI directly: No context wasted on tool definitions

Can someone explain this to me? I've seen claude code try to run a not-well-known package and it basically shot in the dark a command, noticed that failed, then ran the help command for the cli tool to get a list of commands and what they do.

How is that different than passing the tools with an MCP? Like how are we saving context?

Yeah give me the median

I love accessibility, I just want to preface what I’m about to say with that.

I found this site hard to read. I’m reading on my phone btw.

The text is too big for me and the line height (space between lines really) isn’t right, it’s too spaced out. Can I read it? Absolutely, I just can’t read it as fast as I normally would. It’s like when my mom hands me her phone and the text is so large I can barely operate it for a while, then I eventually get used to it to a certain extent.

What’s funny is this itself is an accessibility issue in the opposite direction of most accessibility issues. Just goes to show users should really be able to have their own text preferences reflected on the web.