Comment by jauntywundrkind
3 hours ago
No, the characterization is very important. You've shown no connection to what's actually at stake, to the engagement patterns here, to the need for people to actually use agents in a way they understand, to the needs to work through & arrive together with your agent at an answer. We cant have a technical discussion until you actually show some engagement in the core topics, but you have been too busy raising frivolous objections to derail anyone thinking about the actual topic and technology.
Your proposal to use APIs is a grossly inefficient waste of LLM's time and energy, and far worse, a misuse of human attention that could be much better directed with the multiplayer/coop/peership of webmcp. You propose inventing brand new communication systems for every interaction, and haven't once considered the merits of leveraging the existing communication medium that users know. Rather than engage in WebMCP & what it brings, it's been trying to hide and confuse the matter & bury any discussion under a sea of objections, objections that don't even carry technical merit. If you want to actually reply to any of the interesting things rather than blocking and obstructing discussion, I'll happily re-engage.
I've found everything you have said to be radically damaging to understanding the problems that be, by vastly limiting consideration away from all interesting topics and raising only naysaying quibbles that don't address how users and agents would actually do work. Users and agents need to work together. That's simple, and your posts actively distract from what's unique and different here. I'm not going to accept another null response and then waste my time again, and it's sad that people have been steered away from thoughtful consideration like this.
If your argument has merit, we will see it win in the marketplace. If it doesn’t, then it will not. Simple as that. And I’m definitely not the only one who is looking for an explanation of why an agent-browser interface is the superior approach vis-a-vis the alternatives.
I’m not entirely sure what your angle is, but your tirade makes it sound like you’re emotionally invested in this (and potentially financially invested) and you’re frightened. A confident person doesn’t need all these histrionics.
I just really dislike the uselessness of people who naysay & dont engage! This poor world suffers SO MUCH from Brandolini's Law, from bad information being so easy to create. My heart is torn by bad engagement, by misdirection, away from the good and the interesting and the possible, and there's such an asymmetry that the truth and possibility face, so many ways for potential to be sapped and drained.
Hackers deserve better than such. There is a moral spiritual calling they ought feel to want to explore & think.
I do think WebMCP faces extremely long odds against success. It's incredibly unlikely to win. You started this by talking about companies wanting to do the wrong thing, by discussing how they hate giving users freedom to use the web as they want: WebMCP runs up against that problem. It only wins if a critical mass of users adopt it & can advocate for it, find it better enough & find enough voice to get it adopted anyways. That seems super unlikely. Your practical objection is most real, and part of the brutal badness of this reality. The odds of success only get far worse from there: I don't think a lot of users will have on-ramps to use this technology well. Very few users understand tool calling, very few will have interesting extensions or systems to make use of WebMCP. Especially with mobile browsers often not supporting extensions.
Once again I think you are just so off the mark on the other thing though: 'Let the market see' is wildly out of the spirit of a hackerly discussion. We ought assess for ourselves, be using this space to try to figure out what is good, and what we want to win, and why, on what merits. We ought be calibrating and pushing, trying to develop our thoughts. Humankind the toolmaker is meant to explore, to understand; that's why I dislike naysaying & non-engagement so much. It's against my spiritual values, against in my view the best parts of our nature.
Possibility and good is delicate. Seeing unengaged unthoughtful disregard of it does get to my heart.