[thomasfromcdnjs]

I've been working on BLAH - Barely Logical Agent Host (https://github.com/thomasdavis/blah/blob/master/packages/cli...) for the past few weeks.

It is essentially a standard (has a schema) that has an ecosystem of tools around it.

(completely opensource, no protocol/bridge lockin, no vendor/provider lockin, no ide/client/auton lockin, http/sse/jsonrpc/whatever, local/remote, composable)

So far I'm categorically calling MCP a "bridge", because BLAH supports other bridges such as SLOP (https://github.com/agnt-gg/slop/blob/main/README.md) and conceptually OpenAPI (or simply HTTP) is a bridge.

An example blah.json looks like this

   "tools": [
       {
         "name": "jsonresume",
         "bridge": "mcp",
         "command": "npx -y @jsonresume/mcp@3.0.0",
       },
       {
         "name": "slop_example",
         "description": "Slop example",
         "bridge": "slop",
         "source": "https://ajax-valjs_slop_example.web.val.run"
       },
       {
         "name": "normal_http_example",
         "description": "Normal HTTP example",
         "bridge": "openapi",
         "source": "https:/example.com/openapi.json"
       }
     ],
   }

So blah can orchestra/compose any number of bridges, and it can list any tools it style/format of any bridge. (sorry that sounds so dumb)

For example, you can run `blah mcp start --config blah.json`, and add that to your cursor/claude mcp servers. When you fetch the tools, it loops over all your tools in your blah.json and fetches them whether it is an mcp server, slop server or openapi, it's agnostic and will return a full list of tools pulling from all bridges.

And then you can do `blah slop start`, which will do the same, but the opposite, start a slop server but it will boot up mcp servers and serve them over http too.

So essentially a bridge/protocol agnostic system, you ask for a list of tools, and it traverses everything that can list tools and splats them all together.

That's a little of the main pitch but there are larger plans to try build an ecosystem like npmjs where there is a public registry of any tool (which are just functions at the end of the day). Clouldflare AI team is really getting it right now (https://blog.cloudflare.com/remote-model-context-protocol-se...), most people would rather just tools being hosted for them, and workers is perfect for that.

It also means you just have to add one MCP server and use one configuration file to manage your tools. (Also has way more control over logging which MCP devs would love)

---

And that all maybe sounds complicated, but it's meant to make things A LOT easier. The README.md is horrible, just lots of random ideas and my comment isn't much better, but I'm aiming to have an alpha version in a week or so. Would absolutely love feedback!

4.5 Deep Research Report on BLAH - https://gist.github.com/thomasdavis/3827a1647533e488c107e64a...

[haakjacobs]

I agree, people don't want to manually add all MCP servers they want to connect to. I think we're headed in a direction where dynamic tool discovery will be important. E.g. I want to do "x" which requires doing "y" and "z". The client or server should then search for the tools (or agents as tools) that can do the job. So this would basically be a semantic search for which tools are most likely to do the job, then use those tools, and search for more tools if it needs to. RAG for tools, essentially. I wrote an article on how to give ChatGPT unlimited functions a year ago, where I implemented this method.

I basically created a vector database for functions, and created the store based on the tool description, then added the tool definition as metadata. Then for every request I ran a lookup for tools, added them to the tools list. Since tool definitions are added to the context we would have to do something like this at some stage when we want to implement a lot of tools.

https://blogg.bekk.no/function-retrieval-add-unlimited-funct...

[keithwhor]

This is very cool but definitely has the XKCD standards vibe [0]. If the industry is standardizing on MCP but then we decide it's not good enough, we just end up back where we started. I hope there's enough willpower (and low enough ego) to get to a really tight, single great implementation.

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

[namaria]

Complete with the alt text mentioning USB, which is used in the MCP website to describe it. Someone else said it and I agree, it's not a good analogy. Most of what we do in software development is connecting things. Saying "this is like USB but for X" could cover a huge chunk of what software is.

Besides, this "think of" analogies kinda irk me because I don't want you to give me a mental image you think I can digest, I want to know how it works. Abstractions in software are great and all but the fact that for some reason most explainers have decided they should be opaque is very unhelpful when you're trying to learn.

[soulofmischief]

Only a certain subset of developer spends most of their time "connecting things", and if that's the kind of developer you consider yourself, I'd be looking to either upskill or change professions as this will be the first kind of developer eliminated if we continue to see decent progress in automation.

[keithwhor]

Would disagree there — system integration probably accounts for like 90% of development work; just at different layers of abstraction.

It’s evergreen work that companies are endlessly trying to eliminate or automate yet keep running headfirst into.

[TeMPOraL]

Doesn't mean it's not all the same or boring drudge work :).

Though I disagree with GP's reply to you about being product-oriented and such - 90% of products are just "system integration" with some custom marketing graphics and a sprinkle of vendor lock in :).

Combination of standardization and AI will end in a great carnage of software developer jobs, as system integration is basically the poster child of a job that should not exist in ideal world - i.e. all problems are problems of insufficient automation or insufficient ability to cope with complexity. But there's only so much demand for R&D and creating bona fide new capabilities, and not everyone wants to be a manager or a salesperson...

IDK, might be really the time to pick some trade skills, as manual labor in the field is likely the last thing to be automated away.

[kiratp]

I would urge you to not think this way: https://www.osmos.io/fabric

[ewoodrich]

You probably should've disclosed that you are promoting your own company's AI product here...

[soulofmischief]

I would still feel zero job security in such a position, and would be looking for work which is not only intellectually and creatively rewarding, but considerably more difficult to automate. Often this means becoming product-oriented or getting into leadership positions.

[thomasfromcdnjs]

aha can't disagree with that sentiment, best I can do is not make the standard suck.