[Animats]

We might see a comeback of something like CORBA. One of the things CORBA was supposed to do was to enable a mechanism to ask a server "How do I talk to you"? While that wasn't really used much, it has real potential for the LLM era. We need technologies where a client asks the server how to talk to it, then generates the appropriate requests automatically.

For example, you should be able to ask anything with a shopping cart how to buy stuff. Especially for B2B E-commerce.

[eternityforest]

I think negotiation can be a bad thing. Instead of just making a standard so a server can say "This server complies with the BuyCrap 2.0 protocol", and a way to discover this fact, people make up garbage like "This server has a method called AddToCart which takes a string and an integer in this range".

The introspection mostly is used to ask "do you have this feature I already know about from the spec that really should be a mandatory part of the profile".

It just becomes a way to have 850 variants and optional features instead of a true standard, meanwhile the discovery layer risks taking more effort than a one size fits all protocol that covers a use case would have.

Sometimes it's cool for development though, to get a detailed list of a servers capabilities, like some level of built-in documentation, but in practice it seems to be about the same level of effort as just reading a REST API document anyway, at least for basic use cases.

[Animats]

> about the same level of effort as just reading a REST API document anyway, at least for basic use cases.

The idea is to automate that, using a LLM to read a description and create the appropriate reply messages, retrying until it works. You need at least a rough specification and semi-useful error messages. Then let the system work until it has established communication.

[eternityforest]

I think any LLM that could do that could probably do just as well with a badly written informal README, same as humans do.