[throwaway314155]

1.) Awareness doesn’t mean they will use it. And in practice they often don’t use them.

2.) “ unlike cli tools or APIs you don't have to constantly remind it what MCPs it has available” - this doesn’t match my experience. In fact, bash commands are substantially more discoverable.

3.) Again, this doesn’t match my experience and the major providers recommend including available MCP tools in system prompts/CLAUDE.md/whatever.

4.) Can’t speak to this as it’s not part of my workflow for the previous reasons.

The only useful MCP for me is Playwright for front end work.

[upghost]

Chrome Devtools is similarly an extremely high value MCP for me.

I would agree that if you don't find they add discoverability then MCPs would have no value for you and be worse than cli tools. It sounds like we have had very opposite experiences here.

[throwaway314155]

Interesting. Perhaps it comes down to which platforms we're working on. I don't want to be outright dismissive of it. My primary platform is Claude Code. Are you working with another driver e.g. OpenAI Codex?

[upghost]

No, and its ok to be dismissive of it. I'm just giving an experience report.

Actually my primary value is emacs integration with claude.

I have an mcp with one function ( as_user_eval ) which allows it to execute arbitrary s-expressions against the portal package for emacs.

I use this often with custom slash commands, i.e., `/read-emacs`, which instructs claude to use that mcp to pull the context from multiple pseudoregions in to the context window (along with filenames and line numbers). This saves me from having to copy paste all of that.

I understand what the others are saying but the using the portal to talk to a running emacs client I don't find to be particularly "discoverable" on the cli.

I can say things like, "show me in emacs the test that failed", or, "highlight the lines you are talking about", or, "interactively remap my keybindings to do X", or, "take me to the info page that covers this topic".

This, paired with chrome devtools and playwright, had been a real productivity booster for me, and is quite fun.

I use voice dictation for this so it feels like I'm in Star Trek :)

I'm sure in 10 minutes we will be onto the next version of MCP... skills, ACP, Tools, whatever.

But this extensibility/discoverability for me has been nice. I make no stronger claims than that about "what it is for" or "what is should be", as I am a simple hacker with simple needs.