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Looks like OpenAI, Anthropic, and the MCP-UI team actually worked together on a common standard for MCP Apps: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2025-11-21-mcp-ap... Honestly, I think the biggest friction for MCP adoption has been how un-userfriendly it is. It’s great for devs, but not the average users. Users don't always want to chat, sometimes they just want to click a button or adjust a slider. This feels like the answer to that problem. Full disclosure, I'm partial here because of our work at https://usefractal.dev. We were early adopters when MCP first came out, but we always felt like something was missing. We kept wishing for a UI layer on top, and everyone says it's gonna take forever for the industry to adopt, maybe months, maybe years. I cannot believe the adoption comes so quickly. I think this is gonna be huge. What do you guys think? |
Things like ChatGPT are remarkably limited from a UX/UI point of view. The product can do amazing things but the UI is nothing special. The mac version currently has a bug where option+shift+1 opens a chat window but doesn't give it focus. When I do that from vs code it adds the editor window. But it's completely blind to any browser tab on which I do that. I'm sure there are good reasons for all that. But it strikes me a bit as a work in progress that a good product owner would spot.
With apps some of the more powerful capabilities (llms driving UIs directly, doing things in agentic loops, tool and API usage) are going to require much deeper integrations than are currently there. We get hints of what is possible and nice technology demos. But it's still hard to build more complicated workflows around this. Unless you build your own applications.
We've been staring at this from the point of view of automating some highly tedious stuff that we currently do in our company manually. For example, working with chat GPT seems to involve a lot of copy paste and manually doing things that it can't really do by itself. Even something as simple as working on a document it will do alright work on the text but then make a complete mess of the formatting. I spend an hour a few days ago iterating on a document where I was basically just fixing bullets and headers. Most alternatives I've tried aren't any better at this.
None of this seems particularly hard; it's just a lot of integration work that just hasn't happened yet. We have a bunch of lego bricks, not a lot of fully mature solutions. MCP isn't a full solution, it's a pretty lego brick. Mostly even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't getting around to doing much more than simplistic technology demos with their own stuff. IMHO their product teams are a lot less remarkable than their AI teams.