[esperent]

Most MCPs I've seen could be:

1. A cli script or small collection of scripts

2. A very short markdown file explaining how it works and when to use it.

3. Optionally, some other reference markdown files

Context use is tiny, nearly everything is loaded on demand.

And as I'm writing this, I realize it's exactly what skills are.

Can anyone give an example of something that this wouldn't work for, and which would require MCP instead?

[anon7000]

But this is entirely besides the point. The point of MCP is bundling those exact things into a standardized plugin that’s easy for people to share with others.

MCP is useful because I can add one in a single click for an external service (say, my CI provider). And it gives the provider some control over how the agent accesses resources (for example, more efficient/compressed, agent-oriented log retrieval vs the full log dump a human wants). And it can set up the auth token when you install it.

So yeah, the agent could write some those queries manually (might need me to point it to the docs), and I could write helpers… or I could just one-click install the plugin and be done with it.

I don’t get why people get worked up over MCP, it’s just a (perhaps temporary) tool to help us get more context into agents in a more standard way than everyone writing a million different markdown files and helper scripts.

[bravura]

"The point of MCP is bundling those exact things into a standardized plugin that’s easy for people to share with others." Like... a CLI/API?

"MCP is useful because I can add one in a single click for an external service" Like... a CLI/API? [edit: sorry, not click, single 'uv' or 'brew' command]

"So yeah, the agent could write some those queries manually" Or, you could have a high-level CLI/API instead of a raw one?

"I don’t get why people get worked up over MCP" Because we tried them and got burned?

"to help us get more context into agents in a more standard way than everyone writing a million different markdown files and helper scripts." Agreed it's slightly annoying to add 'make sure to use this CLI/API for this purpose' in AGENTS.md but really not much. It's not a million markdown files tho. I think you're missing some existing pattern here.

Again, I fail to see how most MCPs are not lazy tools that could be well-scoped discoverable safe-to-use CLI/APIs.

[0x696C6961]

That's literally what they are. It's a dead simple self describing JSONRPC API that you can understand if you spend 5 seconds looking at it. I don't get why people get so worked up over it as if it's some big over-engineered spec.

I can run an MPC on my local machine and connect it to an LLM FE in a browser.

I can use the GitHub MCP without installing anything on my machine at all.

I can run agents as root in a VM and give them access to things via an MCP running outside of the VM without giving them access to secrets.

It's an objectively better solution than just giving it CLIs.

[philipp-gayret]

All true except that CLI tools are composable and don't pollute your context when run via a script. The missing link for MCP would be a CLI utility to invoke it.

[0x696C6961]

How does the agent know what clis/tools it has available? If there's an `mcpcli --help` that dumps the tool calls, we've just moved the problem.

The composition argument is compelling though. Instead of clis though, what if the agent could write code where the tools are made available as functions?

   tools.get_foo(tools.get_bar())

[philipp-gayret]

> what if the agent could write code where the tools are made available as functions?

Exactly, that would be of great help.

> If there's an `mcpcli --help` that dumps the tool calls, we've just moved the problem.

I see I worded my comment completely wrong... My bad. Indeed MCP tool definitions should probably be in context. What I dislike about MCP is that the IO immediately goes into context for the AI Agents I've seen.

Example: Very early on when Cursor just received beta MCP support I tried a Google Maps MCP from somewhere on the net; asked Cursor "Find me boxing gyms in Amsterdam". The MCP call then dumped a HATEOAS-annotated massive JSON causing Cursor to run out of context immediately. If it had been a CLI tool instead, Cursor could have wrapped it in say a `jq` to keep the context clean(er).

[ra]

I'm with you because we get to specify our context more precisely.

[jmalicki]

I mean, one could argue skills are sort of MCP 2.0 fixing some of the mistakes.

The big pluses for MCPs are when:

1. They live remotely and update themselves 2. You install the skill and the scripts it uses together locally, so it can be more convenient packaging

MCPs aren't really all that complicated inherently, a lot of mistakes around them happened because they came early.