[simonw]

My theory is that a lot of the buzz around MCP is actually buzz around the fact that LLM tool usage works pretty well now.

OpenAI plugins flopped back in 2023 because the LLMs at the time weren't reliable enough for tool usage to be anything more than interesting-but-flawed.

MCP's timing was much better.

[fhd2]

I'm still having relatively disastrous results compared to just sending pre curated context (i.e. calling tools deterministically upfront) to the model.

Doesn't cover all the use cases, but for information retrieval stuff, the difference is pretty light and day. Not to mention the deterministic context management approach is quite a bit cheaper in terms of tokens.

[visarga]

I find letting the agent iterate search leads to better results. It can direct the search dynamically.