Comment by nostrebored
14 hours ago
this is bad. Anyone doing any cursory work with agents will realize how brittle <<just managing your own prompts>> can be. Adding an extra layer of indirection isn’t helpful, it’s a gigantic hindrance that gives you a moving eval target. Being an MCP developer means you have a moving target of model optimization. It is a win for nobody.
The tools we need to solve this problem exist and they are boring. Types, jsonschema, openapi, all of it is a better integration point than MCP.
That's because you're not thinking about how teams and enterprises work. You're thinking about how individuals work.
An enterprise has 20 services that each have a secret key (Datadog, Snowflake, etc). I want my team to have access to those services via coding agents. How do I guard those keys from both developer and agent? Put it behind MCP; neither dev nor agent ever sees the key. If developer leaves, revoke one OAuth cred.
I want to add access to internal and external services from one entry point without developers across hundred of teams having to sync or update their workspace. Put it behind one MCP interface.
I have enterprise skills and resources that I want to standardize and deliver to every team. But it has to vary in 10-15% of the skill body. Think same heuristics, but different specifics. MCP delivered prompts and resources can do that by dynamically templating them.
I want telemetry and data on how skills and tools are being used and I want to capture them using standard tooling like OTEL regardless of agent harness because I don't want to have to rebuild a solution on hooks if I charge vendors. MCP does that because I can capture all of the telemetry there.
MCP is schema + interaction model. If MCP were built on OpenAPI, it would still need another layer to describe interaction. It is effectively JSON schema + interaction flow + standard surface area.
Your argument feels like asking why do we need OAuth and OIDC when we already have usernames and passwords. They solve different problems. A simple service can just use a secret key or username + password. But more complex enterprise scenarios need the structure and flow of OAuth, SAML, and SCIM.
You’re not talking about how teams and enterprises work, you’re talking about how teams and enterprises don’t work.
Teams and enterprises had problems maintaining API keys long before there was MCP and they will have the same problems afterwards. The better teams and enterprises have had solutions for a long time.
It keeps people employed, yes?
And with people I guess I might actually mean not people but tokens everybody has to spend on keeping their environment self-adapting...