Comment by SkyPuncher
17 hours ago
This is great for normal "apps". We have a really deep need for a lower touch way for our users to interact with us agentically without setting up MCP. It'd be really great to have some sort of temporary session or out-of-band token storage available.
Here's our use case: During the sales cycle, the buyer and seller need to exchange a bunch of information then analyze it (which is increasingly agentic). The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need. MCPs are great for regular, frequent interactions - but create a lot of problems for these quick one-off sessions.
We'd really love a way to do something like this:
* In Claude: "Grab documents from X, Y, Z"
* Claude hits that website, it returns (1) basic usage information (2) a login link that the user can open in their browser
* User auths in their browser (annoying, but mindless)
* That callback returns a unique, short-lived, one-time token that gets exchanged on all future requests to the site.
Now, we can quickly auth users AND maintain a session state as they do things.
> The problem with MCP is the initial setup friction is far greater than users login in themselves and grabbing the information they need.
Can you tell me more about this? With just-in-time client registration (DCR or CIMD) it seems like the MCP registration would be pretty simple.
Is it the configuration of the MCP client to know about the MCP server that is the issue?
Does the website need to be able to advertise "here's the corresponding MCP server" so that the "claude hits website" step becomes "claude hits website, discovers MCP server"?
Yes, it’s the friction of setting up the MCP server in the first place. Especially, in environments where that is not straightforward or easy to do. When our users are looking for information, they don’t want to figure out how to setup the MCP.
I don’t think this is about advertising an MCP at all. All of this can be accomplished with plain old HTTP requests. I want to be able to tell users “tell your LLM do go to https://example.com/only-bots”.
There’s absolutely no need for an MCP, because the website will tell the LLM everything it needs to know, including other actions and endpoints available.
Have you seen WebMCP[0]? Had a customer ask about this recently.
It seems like it might be something of what you are looking for, since it leverages HTML to tell agents about website functionality.
One issue I see with WebMCP is that agents basically free-ride on user identity and authentication, which is problematic in some scenarios.
0: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/webmcp