Comment by vessenes
5 days ago
> "If I could short MCP, I would"
I mean, MCP is hard to work with. But there's a very large set of things that we want a hardened interface to out there - if not MCP, it will be something very like it. In particular, MCP was probably overly complicated at the design phase to deal with the realities of streaming text / tokens back and forth live. That is, it chose not to abstract these realities in exchange for some nice features, and we got a lot of implementation complexity early.
To quote the Systems Bible, any working complex system is only the result of the growth of a working simple system -- MCP seems to me to be right on the edge of what you'd define as a "working simple system" -- but to the extent it's all torn down for something simpler, that thing will inevitably evolve to allow API specifications, API calls, and streaming interaction modes.
Anyway, I'm "neutral" on MCP, which is to say I don't love it. But I don't have a better system in mind, and crucially, because these models still need fine-tuning to deal properly with agent setups, I think it's likely here to stay.
The thing is, MCP is little more than another self-descriping API format, and current models can handle most semi-regular API's with just a description and basic tooling. I had Claude interact with my app server via Curl before I decided to just tell it to write an API client instead. I could have told it to implement MCP instead, but now I have a CLI client that I can use as well, and Claude happily uses it with just the --help options.
If you don't already have an API, sure, MCP is a possible choice for that API. But if you have an API, there is decreasing reasons to bother implementing an MPC server the smarter the models are getting vs. just giving it access to your API docs.
I always see the hard/complex criticism but find it confusing.. what is the perceived difficulty with MCP at the implementation level? (I do understand the criticism about exhausting tokens with tool-descriptions and stuff, but that's a different challenge)
Doesn't seem like implementation could be more simple. Just JSON-RPC and API stuff. For example the MCP hello-world with python and FastMCP is practically 1-to-1 with a http/web flavored hello-world in flask
There is a LOT under the surface. custom routes, bidirectional streaming choices (it started as a "local first" protocol). Implementing an endpoint from scratch is not easy, and the spec documentation moves very quickly, and generally doesn't have simple-to-digest updates for implementation.
I haven't looked in a few months, so my information might be a bit out of date, but at the time - if you wanted to use a python server from the modelcontextprotocol GitHub, fine. If you wanted to, say, build a proxy server in rust or golang, you were looking at a set of half-implemented server implementations targeting two-versions-old MCP specs while clients like claude obscure even which endpoints they use for discovery.
It's an immature spec, moderately complicated, and moving really quickly with only a few major 'subscribers' to the server side; I found it challenging to work with.
Well if your language of choice didn't have any good library support for HTTP, the web version of hello world would be hard too, but it would not say much about the protocol.
Even with these constraints the core MCP design is actually pretty good. First, use stdio transport, and now your language only needs to speak JSON [1]. Then, forget about building proxies and routers and web stuff, and offload that to mcpjungle [2] or similar to front your stdio work.
If that still doesn't work, I think I would probably wrap the foreign language with subprocs and retreat towards python's FastMCP (or whatever the well-supported and fast-moving stuff is in another language). Ugly but practical if you really must use a language with no good MCP support. If really none of that works I guess one is on the hook to support a changing MCP spec with a custom implementation in that language.. but isn't there maybe an argument now that MCP is complex because someone insisted on it being complex?
[1]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/bas... [2]: https://github.com/mcpjungle/MCPJungle
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MCP came in a bit too early, when the conceptual shift of hadn't fully kicked in yet. I see it as a bit of a Horseless Carriage, and I think Skills came in to counter that. My sense is that this will settle into a sort of self-assembling code golem, where ambiguous parts are handled in LLM-space, and clear, well-defined things are handled in code-space.
MCP is another middleware story - this always fails (hat tip Benetict Evans).