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Hey ondrsh, I read your blog post and thought it was very interesting, however I did have a follow-up question: In your post you say "The key insight is: Because this can happen at runtime, the user (NOT the developer) can add arbitrary functionality to the application (while the application is running — hence, runtime). And because this also works remotely, it could finally enable standardized b2ai software!" That makes sense, but my question is: how would the user actually do that? As far as I understand, they would have to somehow pass in either a script to spin up their own server locally (unlikely for your everyday user), or a url to access some live MCP server. This means that the host they are using needs an input on the frontend specifically for this, where the user can input a url for the service they want their LLM to be able to talk to. This then gets passed to the client, the client calls the server, the server returns the list of available tools, and the client passes those tools to the LLM to be used. This is very cool and all, but it just seems like anyone who has minimal tech skills would not have the patience to go and find the MCP server url of their favourite app and then paste it into their chatbot or whatever they're using. Let me know if I have misunderstood anything, and thanks in advance! |
> As far as I understand, they would have to somehow pass in either a script to spin up their own server locally (unlikely for your everyday user), or a url to access some live MCP server. This means that the host they are using needs an input on the frontend specifically for this, where the user can input a url for the service they want their LLM to be able to talk to. This then gets passed to the client, the client calls the server, the server returns the list of available tools, and the client passes those tools to the LLM to be used.
This is precisely how it would work. Currently, I'm not sure how many host applications (if any) actually feature a URL input field to add remote servers, since most servers are local-only for now. This situation might change once authentication is introduced in the next protocol version. However, as you pointed out, even if such a URL field existed, the discovery problem remains.
But discovery should be an easy fix, in my opinion. Crawlers or registries (think Google for web or Archie for FTP) will likely emerge, so host applications could integrate these external registries and provide simple one-click installs. Apparently, Anthropic is already working on a registry API to simplify exactly this process. Ideally, host applications would automatically detect when helpful tools are available for a given task and prompt users to enable them.
The problem with local-only servers is that they're hard to distribute (just as local HTTP servers are) and that sandboxing is an issue. One workaround is using WASM for server development, which is what mcp.run is doing (https://docs.mcp.run/mcp-clients/intro), but of course this breaks the seamless compatibility.