Comment by mikeocool
4 days ago
Except there already was "something" that the creators of MCP just ignored.
Imagine a world where you could:
* Configure your favorite harness/chat client with any OpenAPI spec for an API that supports Oauth2.
* The harness would walk you through the Oauth flow and securely store the token.
* And then insert some tools for discovering the API methods and making requests in to the context.
* The agent could then formulate a request, call the request tool, and the harness would 1) makes sure it's allowed to make a request to that API, and 2) insert the Auth Token into the request.
It would be basically exactly the same way MCP is setup today, except all you would need is an OpenAPI spec. You wouldn't have setup a server for a janky new standard that's half implemented slightly differently by every harness/chat client.
Yeah I'm not a huge AI bull but I've just never understood why MCP needs to exist when OpenAPI could've just been extended
For that matter, why does OpenAPI need to exist when IDL could have been extended?