[bluegatty]

Yes, MCP taking the form of 'skill' because MCP serves no purpose.

The concept of 'mcp server' is a brittle abstraction that need not exist.

A 'skill' is utterly superior in every sense: a 'right sized abstraction for whatever it is you're trying to do' - that can include cli / rest - and other key bits of information.

[didibus]

MCP is a JSON-RPC + a fixed auth/discovery handshake + a fixed tool schema protocol for backend endpoints.

Your skills or CLIs still need to call a backend endpoint at some point. MCP is just a standard server JSON-RPC protocol. Having a standard for that is really nice, you get standardize auth, discovery, API shape, etc.

Is it the greatest RPC design ever, no, most annoying is how it's based around a statefull session. But it's really awesome that we have a standard. Otherwise you'd just have a bunch of random servers all doing their own things that you'd have to figure out how they work and all, it would be much worse.

[ok_dad]

You realize that not every user of agents uses them like Claude or Codex on your local CLI right? MCP is the standard for cloud agents. How do you get a cloud agent working in an ephemeral container access to skills? The answer is MCP.

[bluegatty]

A 'skill' is generic concept - as short set of right-sized instructions for a given cli or api call, it can be applied in any context.

If MCP did not exist today, we wold not invent it.

We'd probably hormonize in basic conventions around json calls, and not much more.

The rest would just be api use / instructions.

LLMS to day are exceedingly good at calling RESTful APIs, the MCP standard provides little advantage.

The advantage of 'skills' is that they are more generic - an Enterprise LLM can evoke 'capabilities' which may or may not involved rpc type calls, and if they do, there will be varying level of instructions provided.

There's almost not point to MCP.

[ok_dad]

Yea so your answer is to build something that’s like MCP basically. You’d standardize conventions around json, great, now standardize auth. Oauth is nice right? That’s MCP. MCP is literally a restful API using JSON with OAuth.

You’re arguing against MCP but have nothing to offer that isn’t nearly the same thing.

[didibus]

Agreed, not sure what people arguing against MCP are even arguing against. The only valid critique of MCP is that you think the RPC protocol isn't ideal, sure, you could argue about the protocol design, for example I wish there was better support for stateless calls. But why wouldn't you want a protocol for back-end API calls? Otherwise you need custom clients for each possible backend you want to invoke.