Comment by paraknight
19 hours ago
I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.
That's what I don't get with AI, isn't it supposed to make us work less? Why do I need to bother making my websites AI friendly now? I thought that was the point of AI, to take something that's already there and extract valuable information.
Same with coding. Now I don't get to write code but I get to review code written by AI. So much fun...
AI is not great at browser use at the moment and it's also quite inelegant to force it to. It's one thing if it reads your nicely marked down blog, it's another for it to do my groceries order by clicking around a clunky site and repeatedly taking screenshots. Not to mention how many tokens are burnt up with what could be a simple REST call.
So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.
As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.
I’m all for making data more machine accessible, but it’s not like there was a shortage of ways to implement that. Hell, if most sites implemented OpenAPI, there’d be no problem to solve.
The choice of whether to make one’s service open to mechanical use is a business decision. Imagine a world in which YouTube could easily be accessed by scripts. Google does not want this; they want quite the opposite.
Yes, when I said Betamax I was actually referring to Swagger/OpenAPI. It's been around for a while but it didn't catch on the way MCP did.
What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.
Ah yes, open API, famously a user accessible means of accessing a website.
We’re talking about agents here. (These are, after all, what MCP servers are meant to serve to.) Thus we’re talking about the need for services to be efficiently agent (computer) accessible, not efficiently end-user accessible.