Comment by alin23

MCP is a tool more for security than anything else. If you give your agents access to an API key, there's a chance they can accidentally or maliciously leak that key. If the MCP server has access to the keys instead, it takes that possibility away. That's not always something you need to care about, but it is very important for some people's threat model.

I +1 this approach. We are doing similarly. Instead of providing MCP, we are simply providing API key and documentation. Folks are able to then just paste that link and use our service.

User will interact or build apps with simply text like: "Give me all the issues that are X, context: https://somedomain.com/llm.txt"

llm.txt will have all the API instructions

One of the key points of the comment you replied to is that you don’t need a very powerful model to do MCP stuff, such as local Qwen. The “let the agent figure it out” approach works much better with powerful models, such as Claude (which you mentioned you are using).

Verging away from the topic, but I've found Claude is a great addition to HA. I want smart home features, but don't have the time/inclination to learn HA's way of working. Historically I just defaulted to Google Home because it was easier, but with Claude I barely need to touch HA configuration at all.

Recently I wanted to set up a slightly complex routine involving some lights and a couple of motion sensors. It feels like magic to be able to describe the behavior I want, briefly discuss the implementation, and walk past the sensor and see it in action.

For Home Assistant, the MCP can enable the LLM to make changes without using up excessive tokens.

For example, the only way to make a change to an HA automation via the API is to POST a whole new copy of the YAML, even if changing one things. The skill and HA MCP I use allows the LLM to use tools which make more precise changes without excessive context usage.

Certainly still works either way though. And of course your LLM instance could just roll its own tools to do the exact same thing.

That's smart! That reminds me, I have to get back into HomeAssistant. I had my whole house through it a few years ago, but the complexity and things breaking in hard to debug ways made the experience too frustrating for my wife and visiting relatives.

Having an agent keep an eye on stuff and fix things proactively should make the experience much better. Plus I can no longer write yamls at last.

> No MCP needed

Definitely helps that the home assistant api is documented online most likely in the training data.

How are you interacting with Claude for this?

Hey thank you! Always nice to hear when my work helps others ^_^

Had no idea that MusicDecoy existed! I just had music app pop up by accident too. Thank you for pointing those apps out

In my apps, CLI came first which works through Mach ports as the IPC, so the "REST equivalent" of macOS apps is also present. MCP takes advantage of the same client-server architecture I created for the CLI, so there's nothing you can't do with the CLI that needs an MCP.

But in my case, a CLI was not enough.

Like, to the MCP I might say:

    Set Clop to make every video copied in ~/shots smaller, 2x and silent 

Then the MCP can use elicitation and say:

    By smaller, you mean re-encode to compress file size (factor can be 0 to 100 max compression) or downscale resolution (100% same size, 50% half size)? 
    And does 2x mean faster speed? In which case do you want to keep frames so the video plays smoother or drop frames for size? Or does 2x mean upscale? 

And the agent will present those as nice choice menus I can decide schematically on.

With the CLI I have to first read, learn and memorize the requests and commands needed for each app, the accepted values and formats and the steps to reach a specific result.

There's only so much space in my head I can leave for implementation details of arbitrary apps. I'd rather have an agent care about that.

And yes I get the irony, those are my apps, I coded them by hand for years, I should know their implementation details, yet even I forget if I should pass 50% or 0.5 for half size.

Btw Clop is a media file compressor for context: https://lowtechguys.com/clop

How do they authenticate to your API?? Do you want to ask normal people to store an API key and remember to rotate it every so often?

agents dont always have access to a terminal. why is this so difficult to imagine

Nothing in there is innovative or unattainable, Clop uses open source tools behind the scenes anyway so obviously you can replicate it with scripts.

But this is for people that already use the app, researchers, writers, students, people that aren't necessarily comfortable with a terminal. And given Clop already implements the basics: an efficient file events watcher, tuned encoders for the Mac silicon, fail safe backups and UI for seeing the result and interacting with it in real time, it has advantages over trying to do it yourself.

I used to do that using the macOS builtin Folder Actions. People forget these exist. Pure GUI.

This is for giving the existing users of my apps the ability to describe what they want the app to do without having to navigate and learn the UI.

Not sure if you got the right context, your question doesn't really make sense to me.

I find it exciting that the dust is finally settling.

We're back onto the original use cases for natural language processing. This is where all the value always was, and now the market has proven to itself what anyone with even a bachelor's in computer science already knew.

Thank you! Yes, macOS 27 continues to be a pain with the all new rewritten window manager.

Still working on finding all the edge cases, so sorry if you still encounter problems there. I've been using it since June and still find problems in input handling.

Like there's this thing, where if an app has Accessibility Permissions and listens to key events (like rcmd does) and then you revoke that permission while the app is running, then your whole system will stop responding to keys and clicks. Until you kill the app in question, but how are you going to do that without a keyboard?

All apps have this problem, even established ones like BTT, because it's a recently introduced macOS behavior in how the internals of CGEventTap work.

Yep like a self-documenting RPC since you don't have to read docs first to use it. You just ask.

Not really. macOS may wait for idle time, may prioritize internal disk and the backup will go extremely slow on an HDD, there's no notification whatsoever.

It's a very specific thing for me really, I connect the HDD specifically for doing backups as fast as possible then I want to disconnect and store it back so I can keep using my laptop. I don't have a desk anymore where I can keep these things connected all the time.

I think the issue is that any mcp could be a cli and llms are very good and using bash.

Of course MCP has its use case like if you want auth, or session based actions.

Some coders, those that equate being a developer with UNIX, mostly.

They pay tons of money for hardware, only to use it the same way I was using those DG/UX terminals at the university.

Naturally there are no coders in other operating systems as well.