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by loufe 453 days ago
To be fair, after seeing the posts I installed the filesystem MCP server made by Anthropic and it is a massive game changer for working with Claude Desktop to program. I guided Claude to develop a 3000 line python wrapper for ffmpeg for my library conversion project as handbrake wasn't automatic enough, Tdarr was overkill for my 1 machine solution, and I wanted a clean interface as I'm not an expert in video encoding.

It has been possibly the most fun I've ever had programming, as it's been unbelievably effective and quick. I believe the hype. I'll note I'm also very wary of the potential of malicious MCP servers and am rather hesitant to use any "community" projects, as much as it saddens me to feel I'm losing my trust in the open source community.
4 comments
leonidasv 453 days ago
I had a similar experience with the read-only Postgres MCP. Just asked Claude "how can I optimise the performance of my database?" and boom, it checked missing indexes, most used tables, work_mem, etc and gave personalized suggestions that made sense. It even used data provided by the `pg_stat_statements` extension automatically.

As simple as MCP conceptually can be, nothing like that was this simple and efficient before MCPs. It's a truly game-changer.

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tudorg 453 days ago
Check out also https://github.com/xataio/agent which builds on this idea in the form of a dedicated agent for Postgres.

Disclaimer: I’ve worked on this project.

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rtsil 452 days ago
The biggest game-changer is that whatever MCP server I need, I can just ask Claude to code it.
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singularity2001 453 days ago
agreed if openai doesn't give their custom GPTs access to local stuff or implement MCP I might switch to claude soon
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mooreds 453 days ago
Interesting. Do you feel like creating an MCP for a niche devtool would lead you to use it or explore it more? Or is the wariness such that you wouldn't want to?
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loufe 452 days ago
Personally I would hesitate to install any MCP server unless from an org I trust as it's a whole lot of extra code to trust/audit for possibly marginal gain. That said, depends what the niche is and if the use-case suits LLMs well.
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stevage 452 days ago
I haven't used Claude yet. Can I ask much it cost to write those 3000 lines?
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throwaway290 453 days ago
the irony is that ffmpeg-python exists (I'm using it in a bunch of scripts) and it also looks like much less than 3000 lines

It's fine for a library conversion project but I won't be surprised this is how things are headed in real production software too

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