[fnordpiglet]

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is very hard to get to use an MCP if literally any Bash() approach is possible, including breaking glass to find creds, even when an MCP is clearly advertised in CLAUDE.md, skills, and explicit user instruction. I find it fascinating that Anthropic makes a product that seems to be really poor at following instructions and OpenAI seems to generally follow guard rails.

[ex-aws-dude]

Isn’t that basically just a —help flag though?

Still easily doable with CLI

[0123456789ABCDE]

> Isn’t that basically just a --help flag though?

mostly, but not enough — i have been experimenting with this, and what i found to help is:

  - help menu is the default, not an error message to stderr. ex: `gh pr` and `gh pr --help` are byte identical
  - if the subcommand, or the options passed are wrong, present suggestions. ex: `gh gists` -> "Did you meant this? gist"
  - the help menu should provide examples like `tldr`. sprites.dev tool `sprite` does this well, `gh` is in the training set so theirs is shorter
  - can you append the docs url to the bottom of the help menu?
  - you're serving llms.txt, right?

[troupo]

> One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape.

So, OpenAPI/Swagger for REST? GraphQL? SOAP schemas? All of these (and more) exist. What does MCP add that these don't have?

[fnordpiglet]

I’m confused by the question. You listed a bunch of standards over time, all of which reach to solve a similar problem (you left off XDR/RPC, CORBA, and about 10000 others), and unironically ask why is there a n+1 standard? Are you genuinely confused?

https://xkcd.com/927

[troupo]

You wouldn't be confused if you actually tried to understand what I was saying. .

Your claim was: "One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape".

This "advantage" has already existed, as you correctly pointed out, in about 10000 other standards and protocols. MCP is not special, and doesnmt have some advantage. It's a vibe-coded hype-driven n+1 standard that is busy ignoring anything that came before it, for no reason.

[jimbokun]

Then give the CLI a man page.

[dnautics]

i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.

[CharlieDigital]

MCP is more than is more than tools. Tools is one of three major features: prompts[0] and resources[1] being the other two.

Prompts are effectively "server delivered skills" which are are quite powerful because it solves a distribution and synchronization problem. It also allows server materialization and dynamic construction of skills.

MCP also has a few other under utilized mechanisms: elicitation[2] on the client side and completions on the server side[3]. It is an API of sorts, but specialized for agent harness <-> server interactions.

[0] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/

[1] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/

[2] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/cli...

[3] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/ser...

[nostrebored]

this is bad. Anyone doing any cursory work with agents will realize how brittle <<just managing your own prompts>> can be. Adding an extra layer of indirection isn’t helpful, it’s a gigantic hindrance that gives you a moving eval target. Being an MCP developer means you have a moving target of model optimization. It is a win for nobody.

The tools we need to solve this problem exist and they are boring. Types, jsonschema, openapi, all of it is a better integration point than MCP.

[usrusr]

It keeps people employed, yes?

And with people I guess I might actually mean not people but tokens everybody has to spend on keeping their environment self-adapting...

[fnordpiglet]

For those of us who lived this wild arc from the advent of normative protocols widely adopted, standards, open source, and the variety of “paradigm shifts” over the last several decades it’s not surprising to see a profusion of attempts at standards with poor adherence across tooling, and fits and starts along the way. Those using the modern web, but not old enough to have built it, which has largely calmed down, probably look about them at the relative order of things and sigh in contentment then squint at the AI agent standards and huff at the confusion. Those few other gray heads who went through the various fits and starts look about at what’s going and recognize it quite clearly as “this is how things look at the beginning.”

We are really only a few years into all this stuff, and the real taking it very seriously has only been about 8 months. Web standards took 8 years to be barely usable. That was built on 30 years of internet standards that were barely usable.

Relax padwan and enjoy the ride.

[CharlieDigital]

That's because you're not thinking about how teams and enterprises work. You're thinking about how individuals work.

An enterprise has 20 services that each have a secret key (Datadog, Snowflake, etc). I want my team to have access to those services via coding agents. How do I guard those keys from both developer and agent? Put it behind MCP; neither dev nor agent ever sees the key. If developer leaves, revoke one OAuth cred.

I want to add access to internal and external services from one entry point without developers across hundred of teams having to sync or update their workspace. Put it behind one MCP interface.

I have enterprise skills and resources that I want to standardize and deliver to every team. But it has to vary in 10-15% of the skill body. Think same heuristics, but different specifics. MCP delivered prompts and resources can do that by dynamically templating them.

I want telemetry and data on how skills and tools are being used and I want to capture them using standard tooling like OTEL regardless of agent harness because I don't want to have to rebuild a solution on hooks if I charge vendors. MCP does that because I can capture all of the telemetry there.

    > jsonschema, openapi, all of it is a better integration point than MCP.

MCP is schema + interaction model. If MCP were built on OpenAPI, it would still need another layer to describe interaction. It is effectively JSON schema + interaction flow + standard surface area.

Your argument feels like asking why do we need OAuth and OIDC when we already have usernames and passwords. They solve different problems. A simple service can just use a secret key or username + password. But more complex enterprise scenarios need the structure and flow of OAuth, SAML, and SCIM.

[PaulHoule]

You’re not talking about how teams and enterprises work, you’re talking about how teams and enterprises don’t work.

Teams and enterprises had problems maintaining API keys long before there was MCP and they will have the same problems afterwards. The better teams and enterprises have had solutions for a long time.

[oliculipolicula]

I wish you would explain more of how you infered the handlers' KPIs here

From my point of view their purpose in life is 1) hacker news highlights or 2) to restrain some patients (me) from getting off the (Freudian) couch and mouthing off at "the folks in the waiting room"

[dnautics]

can these not be surfaced in an api and accessed using curl, with instructions in a SKILLS.md?

[CharlieDigital]

Sure. It would be great if they were portable as well.

To make them interoperable so that the APIs have similar surface areas and can just be used without special skills, we could even come up with a standard API surface area and create a...protocol.

If you squint, the SKILL.md and the context that it takes up is literally the same thing as the MCP server and tool description. They are literally the same thing except one is server delivered and one is not.

MCP is "Let's use Google Sheets and have a server-managed experience". Everyone sees the same thing on the server in real time.

Skills is "Let me download the Excel and send it back to you". Why? How is this better? Every time I update the Excel, I have to add a `.2026.final.final2.xlsx` and everyone updates their copy...how is this the superior experience?