[CuriouslyC]

If you have an API with thousands of endpoints, that MCP description is going to totally rot your context and make your model dumb, and there's no mechanism for progressive disclosure of parts of the tool's abilities, like there is for CLIs where you can do something like:

tool --help

tool subcommand1 --help

tool subcommand2 --help

man tool | grep "thing I care about"

As for stateful behavior, say you have the google docs or email mcp. You want to search org-wide for docs or emails that match some filter, make it a data set, then do analysis. To do this with MCP, the model has to write the files manually after reading however many KB of input from the MCP. With a cli it's just "tool >> starting_data_set.csv"

[prohobo]

This is a design problem, and not something necessarily solved by CLI --help commands.

You can implement progressive disclosure in MCP as well by implementing those same help commands as tools. The MCP should not be providing thousands of tools, but the minimum set of tools to help the AI use the service. If your service is small, you can probably distill the entire API into MCP tools. If you're AWS then you provide tools that then document the API progressively.

Technically, you could have an AWS MCP provide one tool that guides the AI on how to use specific AWS services through search/keywords and some kind of cursor logic.

The entire point of MCP is inherent knowledge of a tool for agentic use.

[troupo]

> like there is for CLIs where you can do something like

Well, these will fail for a large amount of cli tools. Any and all combinations of the following are possible, and not all of them will be available, or work at all:

    tool                    some tools may output usage when no arguments are supplied
    tool -h                 some tools may have a short switch for help
    tool --help             some tools may have a long switch for help
    tool help               some tools may have help as a subcommand
    tool command            some tools may output usage for a command with no arguments
    tool command -h         some tools may have a short switch for command help
    tool command --help     some tools may have a long switch for command help
    tool help command       some tools may have a help command
    man tool                some tools may have man pages
    

examples:

    grep                    one-line usage and "type grep --help"
    grep -h                 one-line usage and "type grep --help"
    grep --help             extended usage docs
    man grep                very extended usage docs


    python                  starts interactive python shell
    python -h
    python --help           equivalent help output


    ps                      short list of processes
    ps -h                   longer list of processes
    ps --help               short help saying you can do, for example, `ps --help a`
    ps --help a             gives an extended help, nothing about a

    erl                     
    erl -h
    erl --help              all three start Erlang shell
    man erl                 No manual entry for erl

etc.

Not to say that MCPs are any better. They are written by people, after all. So they are as messy.

[BeetleB]

> that MCP description is going to totally rot your context and make your model dumb, and there's no mechanism for progressive disclosure of parts of the tool's abilities,

Completely false. I was dealing with this problem recently (a few tools, consuming too many tokens on each request). MCP has a mechanism for dynamically updating the tools (or tool descriptions):

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/mcp#dynamic-tool-updates

We solved it by providing a single, bare bones tool: It provides a very brief description of the types of tools available (1-2 lines). When the LLM executes that tool, all the tools become available. One of the tools is to go back to the "quiet" state.

That first tool consumes only about 60 tokens. As long as the LLM doesn't need the tools, it takes almost no space.

As others have pointed out, there are other solutions (e.g. having all the tools - each with a 1 line description, but having a "help" tool to get the detailed help for any given tool).

[medbrane]

>here's no mechanism for progressive disclosure of parts of the tool's abilities

In fact there is: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

If the special tool search tool is available, then a client would not load the descriptions of the tools in advance, but only for the ones found via the search tool. But it's not widely supported yet.

[fennecbutt]

>man tool | grep "thing I care about"

Isn't the same true of filtering tools available thru mcp?

The mcp argument to me really seems like people arguing about tabs and spaces. It's all whitespace my friends.

[kordlessagain]

Nobody said anything about an API with thousands of endpoints. Does that even exist? I've never seen it. Wouldn't work on it if I had seen it. Such is the life of a strawman argument.

Further, isn't a decorator in Python (like @mcp.tool) the easy way to expose what is needed to an API, if even if all we are doing is building a bridge to another API? That becomes a simple abstraction layer, which most people (and LLMs) get.

Writing a CLI for an existing API is a fool's errand.

[CuriouslyC]

Cloudflare wrote a blog post about this exact case. The cloud providers and their CLIs are the canonical example, so 100% not a strawman.

[locknitpicker]

> Writing a CLI for an existing API is a fool's errand.

I don't think your opinion is reasonable or well grounded. A CLI app can be anything including a script that calls Curl. With a CLI app you can omit a lot of noise from the context things like authentication, request and response headers, status codes, response body parsing, etc. you call the tool, you get a response, done. You'd feel foolish to waste tokens parsing irrelevant content that a deterministic script can handle very easily.