[fergie]

> gws doesn't ship a static list of commands. It reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and builds its entire command surface dynamically.

What is the practical difference between a "discovery service"+API and an MCP server? Surely humans and LLMs are better off using discovery service"+API in all cases? What would be the benefit of MCP?

[jtrn]

Nothing. MCP and HTTP APIs and CLI tools without the good parts. They lack the robustness of the OpenAPI spec, including security standardization, and are more complex to run than simple CLI utilities without any authentication.

I have done it many times, using the swagger.json as a "discovery service" and then having the agent utilize that API. A good OpenAPI spec was working perfectly fine for me all the way back when OpenAI introduced GPTs.

If we standardized on a discovery/ endpoint, or something like that, as a more compact description of the API to reduce token usage compared to consuming the somewhat bloated full OpenAPI spec, you would have everything you need right there.

The MCP side quest for AI has been one of the most annoying things in AI in recent years. Complete waste of time.

[dahcryn]

Benefit of mcp is that it exists and kinda works, and a lot of tools are available on it. I guess it's all about adoption. But inherently yeah it's a discovery service thingy. Google will never embrace mcp since it's invented by anthropic

I consider it a good first attempt, but indeed hope for a sort of mcp2.0

[fergie]

Right, but surely swagger/openapi has been providing robust API discovery for years? I just don't get what LLMs don't like about it (apart from it possibly using slightly more tokens than MCP)

[theshrike79]

MCP is like "this is what the API is about, figure it out". You can also change the server side pretty liberally and the agent will figure it out.

Swagger/OpenAPI is "this is EXACTLY what the API does, if you don't do it like this, you will fail". If you change something, things will start falling apart.

[allan_s]

in a lot of sphere, MCP is still the hype. And it was the hype in even more sphere some month ago.

Because of FOMO a lot of higher up decided that "we must do a MCP to show that we're also part of the cool kids" and to give an answer to their even-higher-up about "What are you doing regarding IA ?"

The project has been approved, a lot of time has been sunk into the project, so nobody wants to admit that "hmmm actually now it's irrelevant our existing API + a skill.md is enough"

I've seen that in at least 4 companies my friends work in, so I would be surprised if it's not something like that here too.

On the contrary claude code, in my experience, has been perfectly able to use `stripe` `gh` and to construct on the fly a figma cli (once instructed to do it).

[anthonypasq]

theres a lot more to the MCP spec than tool calling, and also people ignoring the fact that remote mcps exist

[anthonypasq]

theres a lot more to the MCP spec than tool calling