[growt]

The mcp part is not essential for the actual controlling of the applications. You could “rip out” the mcp functionality and replace it with something else. The only reason why the authors chose mcp is most likely that it was the first and therefore most common plugin interface for llm tools.

[TranquilMarmot]

Unfortunately, most standards that we end up with are only standard because they're are widely used and not because they are the best or they make the most sense.

[whoknowsidont]

It's not even a standard. It's literally not doing anything here. Not only "can" you rip out MCP there is zero technical reason for any of those things to be an "MCP" in the first place.

[theshrike79]

MCP literally is the "something else", if you have a better idea in mind, now is the time to bring it out before the MCP train is going too fast to catch up.

[cstrahan]

(Not OP)

This is pretty well established. See for example:

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mc...

https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/

Code (including shell scripting) allows the LLM to manipulate the results programmatically, which allows for filtering, aggregation and other logic to occur without multiple round trips between the agent and tool(s). This results in substantially less token usage, which means less compute waste, less cost, and less confusion/"hallucination" on the LLM's part.

If one comes to the same conclusion that many others have (including CloudFlare) that code should be the means by which LLMs interface with the world, then why not skip writing an MCP server and instead just write a command-line program and/or library (as well as any public API necessary)?

[Zetaphor]

Isn't that the point they are making? MCP is useful because everyone is using it, not because it has a technical advantage over rolling your own solution. It won mindshare because of marketing and a large company pushing it.

I've actually taken to both approaches recently, using the mcp-client package to give me an interface to a wide array of prebuilt tools in my non-LLM application. I could have written or sourced 10 different connectors, or I can write one client interface and any tool I plug in shares the same standard interface as all the others.