← Back to context

Comment by whoknowsidont

8 hours ago

>This effect is _significantly_ stronger than putting info about available API/cli into CLAUDE.md.

No it's not.

Honestly this conversation is extremely weird to me because somehow people are gravely misunderstanding what MCP even purports to do, let alone what it actually CAN do in the most ideal situation.

It is a protocol and while the merits of that protocol is certainly under active discussion it's irrelevant because you keep adding qualities about the protocol that it cannot deliver on.

Just same facts to help steer this conversation correctly, and maybe help your understanding on what is actually going:

* All LLM's/major models have function & tool calling built in.

* Your LLMs/models do not have any knowledge on MCP, nor have they been trained on it.

* MCP exists, at least the claim, is to help standardize the LIFECYCLE of the tool call.

* MCP does not augment or enhance the ability of LLM's in any form.

* MCP does not allow you to extend agents. That's an implicit feature.

* If you have access to "X" (using your example), you don't need anything that obeys the MCP standard.

MCP at best is for developers and tool developers. Your model does not need an MCP server or client or anything else MCP related to do what is already been trained to do.

>I would personally prefer some other method but having a way to make agents extensible is extremely useful.

They already are. MCP does not help with this.

3 comments

whoknowsidont

Reply
cjonas  7 hours ago

This response is spot on. People seem very confused about what MCP actually is. It's just a standard way to provide an LLM with tools. And even how that happens is up to the agent implementation. There are some other less common features, but the core is just about providing tool definitions and handling the tool_call. Useful but basically just OpenAPI for LLM

smallnamespace  7 hours ago

Three facts to consider:

1. CLAUDE.md is not part of the system prompt

2. The Claude Code system prompt almost certainly gives directions about how to deal with MCP tools, and may also include the list of tools

3. Instruction adherence is higher when the instructions are placed in the system prompt

If you put these three facts together then it’s quite likely that Claude Code usage of a particular tool (in the generic sense) is higher as an MCP server than as a CLI command.

But why let this be a limitation? Make an MCP server that calls your bash commands. Claude Code will happily vibe code this for you, if you don’t switch to a coding tool that gives better direct control of your system prompt.