Comment by 0xbadcafebee
7 days ago
1) MCP does more than just make an API call, 2) only the MCP server has to know about the lightbulb.
Example: right now, I want to add web search to my local AI agent. Normally you'd have to add some custom logic to the agent to do this. But instead, I merely support MCP in the agent. Now I can connect to a SearXNG MCP server, and tell my agent to "use /web_search". Boom, I have web search, and the agent didn't need anything added to it. Similarly, SearXNG didn't need to know anything about my AI agent.
If you "just used HTTP", you could not do that. You'd need to add extra code to SearXNG, or extra code to the AI agent, just to support this one use case.
GraphQL does not have any of the AI-specific features in it, and is way more complex than MCP.
> 1) MCP does more than just make an API call
It literally does that. What MCP calls a "tool call" is literally an API call (well, technically an RPC call since it's just JSON-RPC underneath).
But that's beside the point. Your original claim was this:
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The only way you can connect different applications together are "integrations" (tightly coupling your app into the bespoke API of another app).
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1. The MCP doesn't solve that. Every MCP server you connect to will expose their own bespoke API (aka tools) incompatible with anything else, in data formats incompatible with anything else.
2. No idea what SearXNG is, but if you used Swagger/OpenAPI or GraphQL you could easily have provided a standard way to discover what your API offers, and ways of calling that API
> You'd need to add extra code to SearXNG
You literally added extra code to SearXNG to expose an MCP server.
> GraphQL does not have any of the AI-specific features in it
Neither does MCP. Just because they invented new cute terms for JSON-RPC doesn't make it any more suitable for AI than literally any other protocol. And don't forget the idiocy of using a one-way communication protocol for two-way communication.
MCP re-invented SOAP, badly, with none of the advantages, and most of the disadvantages