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by amannm 391 days ago
It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude specific app integrations, buried underneath some other 3rd party framework that abstracts it away and makes the "spec" irrelevant.
3 comments
BeetleB 391 days ago
Except that in just six months there are literally thousands of MCP servers out there in use.

Will it be supplanted? Perhaps. But it's not going to die a natural death.

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owebmaster 391 days ago
Yes it is gaining traction. It is still bad. And it will probably not improve as the spec will only add things to try to fix it but it should remove.
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quantadev 391 days ago
As long as MCP "just works" (and it does) and is relatively simple enough, then simply by being first, rather than being best, is what made it successful.

It's already gone so viral it's practically entrenched already, permanently. Everyone has invested too much time saying how much they love MCP. If we do find something cleaner it will still be called MCP, and it will be considered a 'variation' (new streaming approach maybe) on MCP rather than some competitor protocol replacing it. Maybe it will be called 'MCP 2.0' but it will be mostly the same and retain the MCP name for decades to come, I think.

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placardloop 391 days ago
MCP and Smithy aren’t comparable. Smithy is an internal tool used by almost every single team (it is used far, far more widely than just the SDK teams) at Amazon to define APIs and generate API servers/clients. It was released publicly because “why not?”, but I assure you that Amazon doesn’t care if you use it or not.
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amannm 391 days ago
the branding is uncanny https://smithery.ai
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what 391 days ago
Uh, I’m pretty sure that’s a completely unrelated directory of MCP servers. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/introducing-smithy-id...
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