Comment by anon84873628

2 months ago

That solution will not work as well when the interfaces have not been standardized in a way that makes it so easy to import them into a script as a library.

Coding against every subtly different REST API is as annoying with agents as it is for humans. And it is good to force vendors to define which parts of the interface are actually important and clean them up. Or provide higher level tasks. Why would we ask every client to repeat that work?

There are also plenty of environments where having agents dynamically write and execute scripts is neither prudent nor efficient. Local MCP servers strike a governance balance in that scenario, and remote ones eliminate the need entirely.

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ianbutler  2 months ago

It's not particularly hard for current models to wire up a http client based on the docs and every major company has well documented APIs for how to do so either with their SDKs or curl.

I don't know that I really agree its as annoying for agents since they don't have the concept of annoyance and can trundle along infinitely fine.

While I appreciate the standardization I've often felt MCPs are a poor solution to a real problem that coincided with a need for good marketing and a desire to own mindspace here from Anthropic.

I've written a lot of agents now and when I've used MCP it has only made them more complicated for not an apparent benefit.

MCP's value lies in the social alignment of people agreeing to use it, it's technical merits seem dubious to me while its community merits seem high.

I can accept the latter and use it because of that while thinking there were other paths we probably should have chosen that make better use of 35 years of existing standards.

simianwords  2 months ago

I don’t agree on the first part. What sort of llm can’t understand a swagger spec? Why do you think it can’t understand this but can understand mcp?

On runtime problems yes maybe we need standardisation.