Comment by eddythompson80

16 hours ago

Not a fan of MCPs for my personal use, but I still think the value for companies is obvious. The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. You only need to "trust" the MCP client implementation, not a thousand different CLIs. Also being a standard HTTP endpoint, a lot of logic can be offloaded to proxies and such.

The second value is more about how business works. There is no chance you can convince someone at WalMart to fund and release a `wmctl` that allows you to search and buy products. Now try to convince your regional Pizza chain to release a CLI too. WalMart and such are incentivized however to create "Whatever OpenAI and Anthropic integrate with". Shopify can create an MCP for every shop and allow the shop owner to customize it. Creating a CLI per shop makes no sense. OpenAI and Anthropic prefer MCPs because of the first benefit. So it works out for all parties involved.

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eddythompson80

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wren6991  12 hours ago

> The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution.

Is this an advantage? Phrased differently, every MCP that could have been a CLI call is a new opportunity for sandbox escape.

  • eddythompson80  5 hours ago

    I don’t follow. It’s the other way around. Would you rather run an arbitrary binary blob (aka: a random cli) or `curl`?

    Edit: Maybe to clarify, I’m talking about remote MCP. Local MCP is obviously nonsensical. Remote MCP is very much thriving aggressively.

    • wren6991  1 hour ago

      If the random blob is running inside of a real sandbox (Landlock/Bubblewrap, VM, ...Docker) then I would take the blob, because I can reason about its capabilities without inspecting its internals. The LLM can run curl as much as it wants if I've `unshare()`d its network access. MCP is an instant obligatory sandbox escape unless I also manage to deploy all the MCP servers inside the sandbox.

      And yes, sorry, I was talking about local MCP. I should have made that clear. I do see people using local MCP quite a bit (Ghidra MCP, Playwright MCP, etc), but maybe this is more of a hobbyist thing.