Comment by otterley
13 hours ago
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.