Everything wrong with MCP

https://blog.sshh.io/p/everything-wrong-with-mcp

by sshh12 • 1 year ago

516 224 1 year ago

blog.sshh.io

"Authentication is tricky and so it was very fair that the designers chose not to include it in the first version of the protocol."

No, it's not fair at all. You can't add security afterwards like spreading icing on baked cake. If you forgot to add sugar to the cake batter, there's not enough buttercream in the world to fix it.

sshh128• 1 year ago

I haven't read a good justification from them on this but it did seem reasonable to me that if the protocol allows auth to be added on top then it's less critical to be in the spec v1 itself.

It's not no security vs security but not standardized vs standardized.

Agree though that's it's not ideal and there will definitely be non zero harm from that decision.

chrisweekly• 1 year ago

great analogy

mickael-kerjean• 1 year ago

I made a MCP server to access remote storage using any kind of protocols (S3, SFTP, FTP, .... ), and authentication was not as much of a problem that most people would make you think. Is it technically pure and beautiful? No. Does it work? Yes and you can check by yourself by pointing the mcp inspector to "https://demo.filestash.app/sse" and play around

fnordpiglet4• 1 year ago

I’ll admit I’m a total dunce with respect to using MCP but given it uses TLS why not just use mutual TLS and validate the client certificate for authentication? You don’t need to use higher level protocols for authentication if your transport protocol supports it already.

I would think authZ is the trickier unhandled part of MCP as I don’t remember any primitives for authorization denial or granularity, but, again, HTTP provides a coarse authZ exchange protocol.

throw12903812904• 1 year ago

There are 2 transports, HTTP and STDIO.

You can use whatever authN/authZ you want for the HTTP transport. It's entirely up to the client and server implementers.

throw12903812904• 1 year ago

MCP can use HTTP or STDIO as transports.

There is no need to implement a new form of authentication that's specific to the protocol because you already have a myriad of options available with HTTP.

Any form of auth used to secure a web service can be used with MCP. It's no different than adding authN to a REST API.

Please just read the spec. It just builds on top of JSON-RPC, there's nothing special or inherently new about this protocol.

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26

There are way too many commentators like yourself that have no idea what they are talking about because they couldn't be bothered to RTFM.

RamblingCTO• 1 year ago

Exactly, lots of people without any idea on what's going on. I implemented an authenticated MCP that uses the context bearer token and passes it on to the backend. Fully authenticated and authorized.

seuros• 1 year ago

Did you read the spec ? Everything you said is already a recommendation.

sshh128• 1 year ago

I think recommendation != being enforceably part of it or being implemented.

There are a lot of great recs in the docs but I wrote this based on what I actually saw in the wild. I definitely don't think it's all on the spec to solve these.

mehdibl5• 1 year ago

You didn't read the spec. And you didn't mention Stdio. Stdio is secure and that's what is used by Claude Desktop the first MCP client and they don't support SSE yet. Since the start, SSE was set a draft and there was a long discussion over the authentification implementation first round already got defined and second is defined again.

I saw a lot of articles since MCP was buzzing same claims copy & paste. And the post show a lot of confusion for what MCP is and MCP do.

klntsky2• 1 year ago

MCP is a dead end for chatbots. Building valuable workflows requires more than tool calling, most importantly, understanding the context of a conversation to adjust the tools dynamically.

simonw3• 1 year ago

What does that have to do with MCP? Those sound like things you would build on a separate layer from MCP.

klntsky2• 1 year ago

MCP tools are completely static. If you have to expose some APIs bypassing MCP, then you don't need MCP in the first place, because you don't have the tools abstracted anymore.

I believe it is possible to build nuanced workflows with well abstracted / reusable / pluggable tools, it's just not as simple as implementing a static discovery / call dispatch layer.

aoeusnth12• 1 year ago

Can you give an example where you would need to adjust tools dynamically based on context? Is that for all tools or just for some?

For example, why does a “Google search” tool need to change from context to context?

lyu07282• 1 year ago

It's great for general and open ended conversation systems where there is no predefined flow or process to follow. Where you have general capabilities you add to the agent (web search, code execution, web drivers, etc.). But a lot of agentic architecture patterns aren't like that, there you want to closely model the flow, guard rails and constraints of the agent. You can't just take a bunch of MCP services and plug them together to solve every business problem. I think it's a bit unfair to MCP because it doesn't seem to even attempt to solve these problems in the first place. It's not replacing things like LangChain.

Everyone should welcome MCP as an open community-driven standard, because the alternative are fractured, proprietary and vendor-locked protocols. Even if right now MCP is a pretty bad standard over time it's going to improve. I take a bad standard that can evolve with time, over no standard at all.

sshh128• 1 year ago

I could see some cases were the tools are user data specific. You upload some csv and now there are some tools customized for slicing and manipulating that data.

It's totally possible to build tools in way that everything is static but might be less intuitive for some use cases.

aledalgrande• 1 year ago

understanding the context of a conversation to adjust the tools dynamically

This just sounds like a small fine tuned model that knows hundreds of MCP tools and chooses the right ones for the current conversation.

totaldude87• 1 year ago

isnt langchain doing the exact same thing? (sorry ai noob here)

simonw3• 1 year ago

Langchain is one of many frameworks that implement the "tool calling" pattern, where LLM applications can request that a tool is run (eg "search the web for X" or "execute this Python code") and see the result of that.

MCP is a standard for describing and exposing tools to LLM applications.

So they're not the same category of thing. Langchain could implement aspects of the MCP specification, in fact it looks like they're doing that already: https://github.com/langchain-ai/langchain-mcp-adapters

the_arun• 1 year ago

So, is MCP a spec for tool calling API?

sshh128• 1 year ago

It's a common question!

Related: > Tool-Calling - If you’re like me, when you first saw MCP you were wondering “isn’t that just tool-calling?”...

Not everyone uses langchain nor does langchain cover some of the lower level aspects of actually connecting things up. MCP just helps standardize some of those details so any assistant/integration combo is compatible.

Edit: +1 simonw above

behnamoh• 1 year ago

Yeah, I don't feel comfortable downloading tiny server programs from random devs on the internet to give my LLM client apps extra "tools". I can LuLu or LittleSnitch regular apps but not these ones.

jwpapi• 1 year ago

I have read 30 MCP articles now and I still don’t understand why we not just use API?

jasondigitized• 1 year ago

I played around with MCP this weekend and I agree. I just want to get a users X and then send X to my endpoint so I can do something with it. I don't need any higher level abstraction than that.

pcarolan• 1 year ago

Right. And if you use OpenAPI the agent can get the api spec context it needs from /openapi.json.

kristoff200512• 1 year ago

I think it's fine if you only need a standalone API or know exactly which APIs to call. But when users ask questions or you're unsure which APIs to use, MCP can solve this issue—and it can process requests based on your previous messages.

pizza4• 1 year ago

I just want to mention something in a chat in 5 seconds instead of preparing the input data, sending it to the API, parsing the output for the answer, and then doing it all again for every subsequent message.

mehdibl5• 1 year ago

Because you need mainly a bridge between the Function calling schema defined that you expose to the AI model so you can leverage them. The model need a gateway as API can't be used directly.

MCP core power is the TOOLS and tools need to translate to function calls and that's mainly what MCP do under the hood. Your tool can be an API, but you need this translation layer function call ==> Tool and MCP sits in the middle

https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/function-calling

throw12903812904• 1 year ago

Here's the kicker. It is an API.

arthurcolle• 1 year ago

It is an API. You can implement all this stuff from scratch with raw requests library in python if you want. Its the idea of a standard around information interchange, specifically geared around agentic experiences like claude code, (tools like aider, previously, that are much worse) - its like a FastAPI web app framework around building stuff that can helps LLMs and VLMs and model wrapped software in ways that can speak over the network.

Basically like Rails-for-Skynet

I'm building this: https://github.com/arthurcolle/fortitude

yawnxyz• 1 year ago

I have an API, but I built an MCP around my API that makes it easier for something like Claude to use — normally something that's quite tough to do (giving special tools to Claude).

throw310822• 1 year ago

I'm not sure I get it too. I get the idea of a standard api to connect one or more external resources providers to an llm (each exposing tools + state). Then I need one single standard client-side connector to allow the llm to talk to those external resources- basically something to take care of the network calls or other forms of i/o in my local (llm-side) environment. Is that it?

lsaferite• 1 year ago

Sounds mostly correct. The standard LLM tool call 'shape' matches the MCP tool call 'shape' very closely. It's really just a simple standard to support connecting a tool to an agent (and by extension an LLM).

There are other aspects, like Resources, Prompts, Roots, and Sampling. These are all relevant to that LLM<->Agent<->Tools/Data integration.

As with all things AI right now, this is a solution to a current problem in a fast moving problem space.

serverlessmania2• 1 year ago

MCP allows LLM clients you don’t control—like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or VSCode—to interact with your API. Without it, you’d need to build your own custom client using the LLM API, which is far more expensive than just using existing clients like ChatGPT or Claude with a $20 subscription and teaching them how to use your tools.

I built an MCP server that connects to my FM hardware synthesizer via USB and handles sound design for me: https://github.com/zerubeus/elektron-mcp.

jonfromsf• 1 year ago

But couldn't you just tell the LLM client your API key and the url of the API documentation? Then it could interact with the API itself, no?

siva7• 1 year ago

ChatGPT still doesn't support MCP. It really fell behind Google or Anthropic in the last months in most categories. Gemini pro blows o1 pro away.

12ian34• 1 year ago

elektron user here. wow thank you :)

aoeusnth12• 1 year ago

If you are a tool provider, you need a standard protocol for the AI agent frontends to be able to connect to your tool.

geysersam• 1 year ago

I think the commenter is asking "why can't that standard protocol be http and open api?"

edanm• 1 year ago

It is an API. It's an API standardization for LLMs to interact with outside tools.

idonotknowwhy2• 1 year ago

I feel like this is being pushed to get more of the system controlled by the provider's side. After a few years, Anthropic, google, etc might start turning off the api. Similar to how Google made it very difficult to use IMAP / SMTP with Gmail

nzach• 1 year ago

why we not just use API

Did you meant to write "a HTTP API"?

I asked myself this question before playing with it a bit. And now I have a slightly better understanding, I think the main reason was created as a way to give access of your local resources (files, envvars, network access...) to your LLM. So it was designed to be something you run locally and the LLM has access.

But there is nothing preventing you making an HTTP call from a MCP server. In fact, we already have some proxy servers for this exact use-case[0][1].

[0] https://github.com/sparfenyuk/mcp-proxy

[1] https://github.com/adamwattis/mcp-proxy-server

raldi• 1 year ago

Did you read this one?

https://norahsakal.com/blog/mcp-vs-api-model-context-protoco...

dend3• 1 year ago

Coordinator of the authorization RFC linked in this post[1].

The protocol is in very, very early stages and there are a lot of things that still need to be figured out. That being said, I can commend Anthropic on being very open to listening to the community and acting on the feedback. The authorization spec RFC, for example, is a coordinated effort between security experts at Microsoft (my employer), Arcade, Hellō, Auth0/Okta, Stytch, Descope, and quite a few others. The folks at Anthropic set the foundation and welcomed others to help build on it. It will mature and get better.

[1] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol...

sshh128• 1 year ago

Awesome! Thanks for your work on this.

dend3• 1 year ago

Can't take any credit - it's a massive effort across many folks much smarter than me.

magicalhippo2• 1 year ago

A nice, comprehensive yet accessible blog post about it can be found here[1], got submitted earlier[2] but didn't gain traction.

[1] https://aaronparecki.com/2025/04/03/15/oauth-for-model-conte...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620496

dend3• 1 year ago

Great news - Aaron has been a core reviewer and contributor to the aforementioned RFC.

martypitt• 1 year ago

Impressive to see this level of cross-org coordination on something that appears to be maturing at pace (compared to other consortium-style specs/protocol I've seen attempted)

Congrats to everyone.

Y_Y• 1 year ago

This reminds me of something Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Ymmv, but I cannot image that this "innovation" will result in a better outcome for the general public.

rglover2• 1 year ago

Yet another piece of rushed technology that's being heralded as "the way" which will most certainly be discarded when the next hype-able acronym comes along.

The only upside to these technologies being shotgun implemented and promoted is that they'll inevitably lead to a failure that can't be pushed under the rug (and will irreversibly damage the credibility of AI usage in business).

pizza4• 1 year ago

To paraphrase the Bjarne Stroustrop quote: There are only two kinds of language model tool calling protocols: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

rglover2• 1 year ago

Okay and now what? Throwing out empty platitudes like this in the face of legitimate criticism is only going to expedite what I said above.

rvz2• 1 year ago

Totally agree.

It appears Anthropic developed this "standard" in a vacuum with no scrutiny or review and it turns out it's riddled with horrific security issues, ignored by those hyping up the "standard" for more VC money.

Reminds me of the micro-services hype, which that helps the big cloud providers more than it helps startups with less money even with some over-doing it and being left with enormous amount of technical debt and complex diagrams costing them millions to run.

mehdibl5• 1 year ago

MCP have a BAD UI?

MCP is not a UI. Seem someone here quite confused about what is MCP.

MCP have no security? Someone don't know that stdio is secure and over SSE/HTTP there was already specs: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/bas....

MCP can run malicious code? Apply to any app you download. How this is the MCP issue? Happen in vscode extensions. NPM libs. But blame MCP.

MCP transmits unstructured text by design?

This is totally funny. It's the tool that decide what to respond. Annd the dialogue is quite

I start feeling this post is a troll.

I stopped reading and even worth continuing over prompt injection and so on.

throw12903812904• 1 year ago

Someone don't know that stdio is secure

I'm sure someone in the comments will say that inter-process communication requires auth (－‸ლ.

frogsRnice• 1 year ago

It absolutely does

ramesh31• 1 year ago

MCP is absolutely a UI. It's just that the "user" is an LLM agent. Properly defining that interface is the main crucial piece of developing any tool.

mehdibl5• 1 year ago

OK the HTTP is a UI. Seriously, these comment are trolling.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

MCP can run malicious code? Apply to any app you download. How this is the MCP issue? Happen in vscode extensions. NPM libs. But blame MCP.

Nobody is saying MCP is the only way to run malicious code, just that like VSCode extensions and NPM install scripts it has that problem.

sunpazed• 1 year ago

Let’s remind ourselves that MCP was announced to the world in November 2024, only 4 short months ago. The RFC is actively being worked on and evolving.

sealeck• 1 year ago

It's April 2025

marcellus23• 1 year ago

Yes, and it's been about 4 and a half months since Nov 25, 2024.

rvz2• 1 year ago

Another article accurately critiquing the short-comings of this terrible "spec".

This is exactly why MCP is hardly a mature standard and was not designed to be secure at all making it acceptable for AI agents to claim to execute commands but could also be stealing your credentials or running a totally different command such or could download malware.

The spec appears to to be designed by 6 month-old vibe-coding developers learning Javascript with zero scrutiny rather than members of the IETF at leading companies with maximum scrutiny.

Next time, Anthropic should consult professionals that have developed mature standards for decades and learn from bad standards such as JWT and Oauth.

EigenLord• 1 year ago

The author makes good general points but seems to be overloading MCP's responsibilities imo. My understanding of MCP is that it just provides a ready-made "doorway" for LLMs to enter and interact with externally managed resources. It's a bridge or gateway. So is it really MCP's fault that it:

makes it easier to accidentally expose sensitive data.

So does the "forward" button on emails. Maybe be more careful about how your system handles sensitive data. How about:

MCP allows for more powerful prompt injections.

This just touches on wider topic of only working with trusted service providers that developers should abide by generally. As for:

MCP has no concept or controls for costs.

Rate limit and monitor your own usage. You should anyway. It's not the road's job to make you follow the speed limit.

Finally, many of the other issues seem to be more about coming to terms with delegating to AI agents generally. In any case it's the developer's responsibility to manage all these problems within the boundaries they control. No API should have that many responsibilities.

Spivak• 1 year ago

I think the author's point is that the architecture of MCP is fundamentally extremely high trust between not only your agent software and the integrations, but the (n choose 2) relationships between all of them. We're doing the LLM equivalent of loading code directly into our address space and executing it. This isn't a bad thing, dlopen is incredibly powerful with this power, but the problem being solved with MCP just isn't that level of trust.

The real level of trust is on the order OAuth flows where the data provider has a gun sighted on every integration. Unless something about this protocol and it's implementations change I expect every MCP server to start doing side-channel verification like getting an email "hey your LLM is asking to do thing, click the link to approve." Where in this future it severely inhibits the usefulness of agents in the same vein as Apple's "click the notification to run this automation."

zoogeny8• 1 year ago

Sure, at first, until the users demand a "always allow this ..." kind of prompt and we are back in the same place.

A lot of these issues seem trivial when we consider having a dozen agents running on tens of thousands of tokens of context. You can envision UIs that take these security concerns into account. I think a lot of the UI solutions will break down if we have hundreds of agents each injecting 10k+ tokens into a 1m+ context. The problems we are solving for today won't hold as LLMs continue to increase in size and complexity.

sshh128• 1 year ago

Totally agree, hopefully it's clear closer to the end that I don't actually expect MCP to solve and be responsible for a lot of this. More so MCP creates a lot of surface area for these issues that app developers and users should be aware of.

Someone• 1 year ago

Rate limit and monitor your own usage. You should anyway. It's not the road's job to make you follow the speed limit.

In some sense, urban planners do design roads to make you follow the speed limit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming:

“Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers”

fsndz• 1 year ago

why would anyone accept to expose sensitive data so easily with MCP ? also MCP does not make AI agents more reliable, it just gives them access to more tools, which can decrease reliability in some cases:https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/mcp-is-mostl...

Eisenstein• 1 year ago

People accept lots of risk in order to do things. LLMs offer so much potential that people want to use so they will try, and it is but through experience that we can learn to mitigate any downsides.

ZiiS• 1 year ago

Rate limit and monitor your own usage. You should anyway. It's not the road's job to make you follow the speed limit.

A better metaphor is the car, not the road. It is legally required to accurately tell you your speed and require deliberate control to increase it.

Even if you stick to a road; whoever made the road is required to research and clearly post speed limits.

jacobr19• 1 year ago

Exactly. It is pretty common for APIs to actually signal this too. Headers to show usage limits or rates. Good error codes (429) with actual documentation on backoff timeframes. If you use instrument your service to respect read and respect the signals it gets, everything moves smoother. Backing stuff like that back into the MCP spec or at least having common conventions that are applied on top will be very useful. Similarly for things like tracking data taint, auth, tracing, etc ... Having a good ecosystem makes everything play together much nicer.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

Also extending the metaphor, you can make a road that controls where you go and makes sure you don't stray from it (whether by accident or on purpose): it's called rail, and its safety guarantees come with reduced versatility.

Don't blame roads for not being rail, when you came in a car because you need the flexibility that the train can't give you.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

Yeah. That's another in a long line of MCP articles and blogposts that's been coming up over the past few weeks, that can be summarized as "breaking news: this knife is sharp and can cut someone if you swing it at people, it can cut you if you hold it the wrong way, and is not a toy suitable for small children".

Well, yes. A knife cuts things, it's literally its only job. It will cut whatever you swing it at, including people and things you didn't intend to - that's the nature of a general-purpose cutting tool, as opposed to e.g. safety razor or plastic scissors for small children, which are much safer, but can only cut few very specific things.

Now, I get it, young developers don't know that knives and remote access to code execution on a local system are both sharp tools and need to be kept out of reach of small children. But it's one thing to remind people that the tool needs to be handled with care; it's another to blame it on the tool design.

Prompt injection is a consequence of the nature of LLMs, you can't eliminate it without degrading capabilities of the model. No, "in-band signaling" isn't the problem - "control vs. data" separation is not a thing in nature, it's designed into systems, and what makes LLMs useful and general is that they don't have it. Much like people, by the way. Remote MCPs as a Service are a bad idea, but that's not the fault of the protocol - it's the problem of giving power to third parties you don't trust. And so on.

There is technical and process security to be added, but that's mostly around MCP, not in it.

Joker_vD• 1 year ago

Well. To repurpose you knife analogy, they (we?) duct-taped a knife on an erratic, PRNG-controlled roomba and now discover that people are getting their Achilles tendons sliced. Technically, it's all functioning exactly as intended, but: this knife was designed specifically to be attached to such roombas, and apparently nobody stopped to think whether it was such a great idea.

And admonishments of "don't use it when people are around, but if you do, it's those people's fault when they get cut: they should've be more careful and probably wore some protective foot-gear" while technically accurate, miss the bigger problem. That is, that somebody decided to strap a sharp knife to a roomba and then let it whiz around in the space full of people.

Mind you, we have actual woodcutting table saws with built-in safety measures: they instantly stop when they detect contact with human skin. So you absolutely can have safe knives. They just cost more, and I understand that most people value (other) people's health and lives quite cheaply indeed, and so don't bother buying/designing/or even considering such frivolities.

skybrian• 1 year ago

The problem with the “knife is sharp” argument is that it’s too generic. It can be deployed against most safety improvements. The modern world is built on driving accident rates down to near-zero. That’s why we have specialized tools like safety razors. Figuring out what to do to reduce accident rates is what postmortems are for - we don’t just blame human error, we try to fix things systematically.

As usual, the question is what counts as a reasonable safety improvement, and to do that we would need to go into the details.

I’m wondering what you think of the CaMeL proposal?

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/#atom-everything

peterlada2• 1 year ago

Love the trollishness/carelessness of your post. Exactly as you put it: "it is not the road's job to limit your speed".

Like a bad urban planner building a 6 lane city road with the 25mph limit and standing there wondering why everyone is doing 65mph in that particular stretch. Maybe sending out the police with speed traps and imposing a bunch of fines to "fix" the issue, or put some rouge on that pig, why not.

reliabilityguy• 1 year ago

It's not the road's job to make you follow the speed limit.

Good road design makes it impossible to speed.

noodletheworld3• 1 year ago

Some of the other issues are less important than others, but even if you accept “you have to take responsibility for yourself”, let me quote the article:

As mentioned in my multi-agent systems post, LLM-reliability often negatively correlates with the amount of instructional context it’s provided. This is in stark contrast to most users, who (maybe deceived by AI hype marketing) believe that the answer to most of their problems will be solved by providing more data and integrations. I expect that as the servers get bigger (i.e. more tools) and users integrate more of them, an assistants performance will degrade all while increasing the cost of every single request. Applications may force the user to pick some subset of the total set of integrated tools to get around this.

I will rephrase it in stronger terms.

MCP does not scale.

It cannot scale beyond a certain threshold.

It is Impossible to add an unlimited number of tools to your agents context without negatively impacting the capability of your agent.

This is a fundamental limitation with the entire concept of MCP and needs addressing far more than auth problems, imo.

You will see posts like “MCP used to be good but now…” as people experience the effects of having many MCP servers enabled.

They interfere with each other.

This is fundamentally and utterly different from installing a package in any normal package system, where not interfering is a fundamental property of package management in general.

Thats the problem with MCP.

As an idea it is different to what people trivially expect from it.

weird-eye-issue2• 1 year ago

I think this can largely be solved with good UI. For example, if an MCP or tool gets executed that you didn't want to get executed, the UI should provide an easy way to turn it off or to edit the description of that tool to make it more clear when it should be used and should not be used by the agent.

Also, in my experience, there is a huge bump in performance and real-world usage abilities as the context grows. So I definitely don't agree about a negative correlation there, however, in some use cases and with the wrong contexts it certainly can be true.

kiitos5• 1 year ago

It is Impossible to add an unlimited number of tools to your agents context without negatively impacting the capability of your agent.

Huh?

MCP servers aren't just for agents, they're for any/all _clients_ that can speak MCP. And capabilities provided by a given MCP server are on-demand, they only incur a cost to the client, and only impact the user context, if/when they're invoked.

empath75• 1 year ago

"Sequential thinking" is one that I tried recently because so many people recommend it, and I have never, ever, seen the chatbot actually do anything but write to it. It never follows up any of it's chains of thoughts or refers to it's notes.

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

Simple: if the choice is getting overwhelming to the LLM, then... divide and conquer - add a tool for choosing tools! Can be as simple as another LLM call, with prompt (ugh, "agent") tasked strictly with selecting a subset of available tools that seem most useful for the task at hand, and returning that to "parent"/"main" "agent".

You kept adding more tools and now the tool-master "agent" is overwhelmed by the amount of choice? Simple! Add more "agents" to organize the tools into categories; you can do that up front and stuff the categorization into a database and now it's a rag. Er, RAG module to select tools.

There are so many ways to do it. Using cheaper models for selection to reduce costs, dynamic classification, prioritizing tools already successfully applied in previous chat rounds (and more "agents" to evaluate if a tool application was successful)...

Point being: just keep adding extra layers of indirection, and you'll be fine.

ezyang• 1 year ago

I quite liked this article, actually, and I'm quite an MCP stan. These all seem like legitimate problems that the burgeoning ecosystem needs to figure out. Some of them will be logically solved inside the MCP spec, but I also think some won't.

jeswin2• 1 year ago

MCP servers can run (malicious code) locally.

I wrote an MCP Server (called Codebox[1]) which starts a Docker container with your project code mounted. It works quite well, and I've been using it with LibreChat and vscode. In my experience, Agents save 2x the time (over using an LLM traditionally) and is less typing, but at roughly 3x the cost.

The idea is to make the entire Unix toolset available to the LLM (such as ls, find), along with project specific tooling (such as typescript, linters, treesitter). Basically you can load whatever you want into the container, and let the LLM work on your project inside it. This can be done with a VM as well.

I've found this workflow (agentic, driven through a Chat based interface) to be more effective compared to something like Cursor. Will do a Show HN some time next week.

[1] https://github.com/codespin-ai/codebox-js

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

Any interpreter can run malicious code. Mostly the guidance is: don't run malicious code if you don't want it to run. The problem isn't the interpreter/tool but the entity that's using it. Because that's the thing that you should be (mis)-trusting.

The issue is two fold:

- models aren't quite trustworthy yet.

- people put a lot of trust in them anyway.

This friction always exist with security. It's not a technical problem that can or should be solved on the MCP side.

Part of the solution is indeed going to come from containerization. Give MCP agents access to what they need but not more. And part of it is going to come from some common sense and the tool UX providing better transparency into what is happening. Some of the better examples I've seen of Agentic tools work like you outline.

I don't worry too much about the cost. This stuff is getting useful enough that paying a chunk of what normally would go into somebody's salary actually isn't that bad of a deal. And of course cost will come down. My main worry is actually speed. I seem to spend a lot of time waiting for these tools to do their thing. I'd love this stuff to be a bit zippier.

jeswin2• 1 year ago

Give MCP agents access to what they need but not more.

My view is that you should give them (Agents) a computer, with a complete but minimal Linux installation - as a VM or Containerized. This has given me better results, because now it can say fetch information from the internet, or do whatever it wants (but still in the sandbox). Of course, depending on what you're working on, you might decide that internet access is a bad idea, or that it should just see the working copy, or allow only certain websites.

peterlada2• 1 year ago

Let me give you some contrast here:

- employees are not necessarily trustworthy

- employers place a lot of trust in them anyway

lacker• 1 year ago

Is anyone successfully using Claude Code along with MCP?

I feel like I hear very many stories of some company integrating with MCP, many fewer stories from users about how it helps them.

zoogeny8• 1 year ago

I've heard the opposite, stories from users that MCP has been a flop. One of my acquaintances works in marketing and is a heavy LLM user. He got swept up in the hype of MCPs and tried a bunch of them out. He was expressing his disappointment and frustration.

It is a drawback of hype and early adoption. I think highly technical users can get value out of it for now and can keep their expectations in line. If I am building my own MCP server and it is a bit flaky, I manage that responsibility myself. If I am wiring up a MCP server that makes some claims of automating some workflow and it doesn't work, then I negatively associate that with the very idea of MCP.

israrkhan• 1 year ago

I feel MCP emerged too quickly. It will take some time and further protocol versions/enhancements for it to mature, and address stuff like security. Also it was not vetted by a conventional standards body, but just made public by a company. Lots of hype around it, everyone seems to be talking MCP these days.

sgt1013• 1 year ago

This is a key point - where are the applications?

Normally we have a standard when we have applications, but I am not seeing these yet... perhaps I am blind and mad!

jacobr19• 1 year ago

Three big places:

1 - Claude Desktop (and some more niche AI chat apps) - you can use MCPs to extend these chat systems today. I use a small number daily.

2 - Code Automation tools - they pretty much all have added MCP. Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, VSCode GH Codepilot, etc ...

3 - Agent/LLM automation frameworks. There are a ton of tools to build agentic apps and many support using MCP to to integrate third party APIs with limited to no boilerplate. And if there are are large libraries of every third party system you can imagine (like npm - but for APIs) then these are going to get used.

Still early days - but tons of real use, at least by the early adopter crowd. It isn't just a spec sitting on a shelf for all the many faults.

cruffle_duffle6• 1 year ago

They are little things like “hey I want to get the LLM to fetch logs from elasticsearch” or “hey I want to create a way for the LLM to query my database in a more structured way”.

And yeah in theory openapi can do it but not nearly as token efficient or user efficient. OpenAPI doesn’t help actually “connect” the LLM to anything, it’s not a tool itself but a spec. To use an OpenAPI compliant server you’d still need to tell the LLM how to authenticate, what the server address is, what tool needs to be used to call out (curl?) and even then you’d still need an affordance for the LLM to even make that call to curl. That “afforance” is exactly what MCP defines. It provides a structured way for the LLM to make tool calls.

seinecle• 1 year ago

A natural follow up: is Google's newly launched a2a better equipped to handle these security issues?

krige• 1 year ago

Does it at least say "END OF LINE" and banish wannabe hackers to the game grid?

otabdeveloper44• 1 year ago

It's so over
We are so back

sixhobbits• 1 year ago

I'm sure MCP does have legitimate problems and some might even be covered in this article but the author would benefit by spending more time refining their criticisms.

There's a whole section on how people can do things like analyse a combination of slack messages, and how they might use that information. This is more of an argument suggesting agents are dangerous. You can think MCP is a good spec that lets you create dangerous things but conflating these arguments under "mcp bad" is disingenuous.

Id rather have more details and examples on the problem with the spec itself. "You can use it to do bad things" doesn't cut it. I can use http and ssh to bad things too, so it's more interesting to show how Eve might use MCP to do malicious things to Alice or Bob who are trying to use MCP as intended.

lbeurerkellner• 1 year ago

I think what is not to be overlooked in these discussions, is the user base of MCP.

In my experience, many less-technical folks started using MCP, and that makes security issues all the more relevant. This audience often lacks intuition around security best-practices. So it’s definitely important to raise awareness around this.

madrox• 1 year ago

Nothing the author said is wrong, but I don’t know how much it matters or if it would’ve been better if it handled all this out of the gate. I think if MCP were more complicated no one would’ve adopted it.

Being pretty close to OAuth 1.0 and the group that shaped it I’ve seen how new standards emerge, and I think it’s been so long since new standards mattered that people forgot how they happen.

I was one of the first people to criticize MCP when it launched (my comment on the HN announcement specifically mentioned auth) but I respect the groundswell of support it got, and at the end of the day the standard that matters is the one people follow, even if it isn’t the best.

a3w• 1 year ago

BetaMax is better than VHS, the latter won.

Rkt is better than Docker, later won.

${TBD} is better than MCP, my bet is on MCP.

mdaniel4• 1 year ago

Rkt is better than Docker, later won.

Your experience with rkt is way different from mine. I would gladly accept "podman is..." or even "nerdctl is..." but I hate rkt so much and was thrilled when it disappeared from my life

idonotknowwhy2• 1 year ago

BetaMax had better fidelity than VHS, but initially could only hold 60 minutes of A/V while VHS could do 120m (ie, almost a full movie without swapping tapes)

rcarmo• 1 year ago

There is one thing I pointed out in https://taoofmac.com/space/notes/2025/03/22/1900 and seems to be missing from the article:

"... MCP tends to crowd the model context with too many options. There doesn’t seem to be a clear way to set priorities or a set of good examples to expose MCP server metadata–so your model API calls will just pack all the stuff an MCP server can do and shove it into the context, which is both wasteful of tokens and leads to erratic behavior from models."

sshh128• 1 year ago

It's in there briefly in the llm limitations section.

jascha_eng• 1 year ago

Something that I struggle with in regards to MCP and no-ones really touches on: We don't even know if this "general" Chatbot paradigm will persist. So far I got the feeling that we end up building specialized apps for specialized use-cases (e.g. cursor or claude code for coding) These then bring their own set of tools (for file writing, reading, running bash commands, etc.) and don't really need MCP (except for very niche use-cases maybe).

I don't really see the point yet where LLMs become so good that I throw my specialized LLM tools out and do everything in one claude desktop window. It simply doesn't work generic enough.

Also... if you end up building something custom, you end up having to reimplement the tool calling again anyways. MCP really is just for the user facing chat agents, which is just one section of AI applications. It's not as generically applicable as implied.

fragmede2• 1 year ago

If you have a better idea you could get millions in VC funding to pursue that. Chat is where it's at. It's fine to think that it's not gonna be the be-all and end-all of AI, but it's pretty fundamentally how we interact with each other, so I don't see it going away any time soon. There's also a thing as being too generic. So really they just hit this sweet spot.

skydhash2• 1 year ago

If you have a better idea you could get millions in VC funding to pursue that.

I would like to see:

- Some Smalltalk-like IWE (Integrated Work Environment), creating prompt snippets and chaining them together.

- A spreadsheet like environment. Prompt's result are always tables and you have the usual cell reference available.

zoogeny8• 1 year ago

Interestingly, my criticism is exactly the opposite of yours. I think as LLMs become more and more capable (and crucially multi-modal) we will need the external tools less and less.

For example, why would I want an MCP that can drive Photoshop on my behalf? Like I say to the LLM "remove this person from the photo" and it opens Photoshop, uses the magic wand select tool, etc. That is silly in my mind. I want to say "remove this person" and the LLM sends me a perfect image with the person gone.

I extend that idea for just about any purpose. "Edit this video in such and such a way". "Change this audio in such and such a way". "Update this 3d model in such and such a way". No tool needed at all.

And that will lead to more multi-modal input. Like, if I could "mark up" a document with pen marks, or an image. I want tools that are a bit better than language for directing the attention of the model towards the goals I want them to achieve. Those will be less "I am typing text into a chat interface with bubbles" but the overall conversational approach stays intact.

otabdeveloper44• 1 year ago

We don't even know if this "general" Chatbot paradigm will persist

It won't. These startups are selling the sci-fi robot assistant dream; think Tony Stark or Captain Picard or whatever. Once the novelty wears off nobody is going to pay big bucks for what is essentially just childhood nostalgia.

For everything else you'd want hyperspecialized language manipulation tools.

torginus• 1 year ago

Is it just me, or is this thing really, really stupid?

I mean the whole AI personal assistant shebang from all possible angles.

Imagine, for example if booking.com built an MCP server allowing you to book a hotel room, query all offers in an area in a given time, quickly, effortlessly, with a rate limit of 100 requests/caller/second, full featured, no hiding or limiting data.

That would essentially be asking them to just offer you their internal databases, remove their ability to show you ads, remove the possibility to sell advertisers better search rankings, etc.

It would be essentially asking them to keel over and die, and voluntarily surrender all their moat.

But imagine for a second they did do that. You get the API, all the info is there.

Why do you need AI then?

Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding.

It would be essentially a smart search box, where you could type in 'book trip to Thailand for 4 people, 1 week, from July 5th', and then it would parse your query, call out to MCP, and display the listings directly to you, where you could book with a click.

The AI value add here is minimal, even non-existent.

This applies to every service under the sun, you're essentially creating a second Internet just for AIs, without all the BS advertising, fluff, clout chasing and time wasting. I, as a human am dying to get access to that internet.

Edit: I'm quite sure this AI MCP future is going to be enshittified in some way.

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

"What is Hooli? Excellent question. Hooli isn't just another high tech company. Hooli isn't just about software. Hooli...Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it. Making the world a better place, through minimal message oriented transport layers. I firmly believe we can only achieve greatness if first we achieve goodness."

bob1029• 1 year ago

It's not just you.

However, I would say that I've grown to accept that most people prefer these more constrained models of thinking. Constraints can help free the mind up in other ways. If you do not perceive MCP as constraining, then you should definitely use it. Wait until you can feel the pain of its complexity and become familiar with it. This will be an excellent learning experience.

Also consider the downstream opportunities that this will generate. Why not plan a few steps ahead and start thinking about a consultancy for resolving AI microservices clusterfucks.

sgt1013• 1 year ago

This is what torpedoed the first AI Assistant push in the late 1990's and early 2000s (see electric elves as an example). Basically we thought that personal travel assistants and open trading platforms would be cool things, but then discovered that content aggregators a) had a business model and b) could offer vertical integration and bulk buys, & discounts to goods providers and consumers, while also policing the platform. So we got Expedia and Ebay.

There is a more fundamental problem as well. Multi-agent systems require the programmer of the agent to influence the state of the agent in order that the agent can act to influence the states of other agents in the system. This is a very hard programming task.

criley2• 1 year ago

It doesn't make sense for a middleman like booking.com to let you completely bypass everything they offer.

However it certainly might make sense for an individual hotel to let you bypass the booking.com middleman (a middleman that the hotel dislikes already).

Scenario 1: You logon to booking.com, deal with a beg to join a subscription service (?), block hundreds of ads and trackers, just to search searching through page after page of slop trying to find a matching hotel. You find it, go to the hotels actual webpage and book there, saving a little bit of money.

Scenario 2: You ask your favorite Deep Research AI (maybe they've come up with Diligent Assistant mode) to scan for Thai hotels meeting your specific criteria (similar to the search filters you entered on booking.com) and your AI reaches out to Hotel Discovery MCP servers run by hotels, picks a few matches, and returns them to you with a suggestion. You review the results and select one. The AI agent points out some helpful deals and rewards programs that might apply. Your AI completes the booking.

The value that AI gave you is you no longer did the searching, dealt with the middleman, viewed the ads, got begged to join a subscription service, etc.

However to the hotel, they already don't really like booking.com middleman. They already strongly prefer you book directly with them and give you extra benefits for doing so. From the hotel's perspective, the AI middleman is cheaper to them than booking.com and still preserves the direct business relationship.

viraptor• 1 year ago

You're arguing against your own straw man. "Imagine, for example if booking.com built an MCP server allowing you to book a hotel room (…) no hiding or limiting data." They're not doing that and they're not interested in that. Yes, they would need a public API for that and people could use it directly. But that's not happening.

MCP makes sense where the API already exists and makes the biggest difference if the API call is just a part of the process, not the only and final action.

Even in the booking example, you could push much more of your context into the process and integrate other tools. Rank the results by parking availability or distance to the nearest public/street parking, taking your car's height into account, looking through reviews for phrases you care about (soft bed, child care, ...) and many others things. So now we've got already 4+ different tools that need to work together, improving the results.

Xelynega4• 1 year ago

I think you missed the point.

To "rank the results by parking availability" you need the results. Currently these are behind paid API keys or frontends with ads.

Why would booking.com allow you to download their entire set of results multiple times through an API for free, when they charge people for that?

jacobr19• 1 year ago

If computer use gets good enough (it isn't just yet ... but it is getting better _fast_) then it doesn't matter, you'll be able to browse the sites the same way a human does to bypass whatever shit they want to toss in your way. This makes their business models much more precarious. Also it makes removing the aggregator easier - you could search for the hotels, query their sites directly. Hotels and airlines have been trying to cut out middlemen for years, they just can't afford to lose the inbound traffic/sales it gives them. But the dynamic shifts every 5-10 years in small ways. Maybe this will be a big shift.

That said, even if the equilibrium changes from today (and I think it will) I still share your cynicism that enshittification will ensue in some form. One example right now is the increasing inability to trust any reviews from any service.

dboreham• 1 year ago

Yes, the metaproblem is: it has to make money. It turns out that "doing genuinely useful things for end users" almost never makes money. I found this out long ago when I had the experience that booking air travel for optimized cost/convenience was a total pain. I figured software can solve this, so built a ticket search engine that supported the query semantics a human typically wants. Dumb idea because you can't get the data over which to search except from airlines, and airlines know that making it convenient to find low convenient fares makes them less money. So they won't give you the data. In fact the entire problem "finding cheap convenient air fare" is actually there in support of someone else's (the airlines) business model.

tomjen3• 1 year ago

I don't buy it.

If they had an API Booking would not likely return their data to you, they would almost certainly have an API that you would search and which would then return the same result you get on their website. Probably with some nice JSON or XML formatting.

Booking makes a small amount of ads, but they are paid by the hotels that you book with. And yes, today they already have to compete with people who go there see a hotel listing and go find the actual hotel off-site. That would not really change if they create an MCP.

It might make it marginally more easy to do, especially automatically. But I suspect the real benefits of booking.com is: A) that you are perceived to get some form of discount and B) you get stamps toward the free stay. And of course the third part which is you trust Booking more than some random hotel.

I actually think it would be a good idea for Booking to have an API. What is the alternative?

I can right now run a Deep search for great hotels in Tokyo - that will probably go through substantially all hotels in Tokyo. Go to the hotel's website and find the information, then search through and find exactly what I want.

Booking.com might prefer I go go to their website, but I am sure they would prefer above all that you book through them.

In fact I think the idea of advertisement is given above impact here, possibly because its a popular way for the places that employ the kind of people who post here to make money, but substantially all businesses that are not web-based and that do not sell web-based services for free don't make their money through ads (at least not directly). For all those places ads are an expense and they would much prefer your AI search their (comparably cheap to serve) websites.

Basically, the only website owners who should object to you going to their website through an AI agent are those who are in the publishing industry and who primarily make money through ads. That is a small number of all possible businesses.

zoogeny8• 1 year ago

Companies that want to maintain a data moat will work to maintain that moat in the face of any new technology.

But not all data in the world is protected in that way. The use cases they promote are just easy to grasp, although they are misleading due to the reality that those examples are often ones protected by data moats.

I mean, I doubt Facebook is going to create an MCP that allows you to deeply access your social graph in a way that will allow you to bypass whatever tracking they want to do to feed their ad business. But Blender, the open source 3d application, may provide a decent MCP to interact with their application. And Wikipedia might get a few decent MCP integrations to expose their knowledge base for easier integration with LLMs (although less useful I suppose considering every LLM would be trained on that data anyway).

I guess it is just a matter of optimism vs. pessimism, (glass half empty vs. glass half full). MCP won't make data moats disappear, but they may make data that isn't behind a moat easier to work with for LLMs.

novoreorx• 1 year ago

How well the protocol is designed doesn't matter, the most popular choice is not necessarily the best one. Sometimes "worse is better."

_pdp_• 1 year ago

Like IE6?

jtrn2• 1 year ago

What do we gain by using MCP that cloud not be achieved worth OpenAPI standard. It feels extremely redundant to me.

emilsedgh• 1 year ago

The biggest advantage of this is for the llm providers like OAI not application developers.

LLM's are brains with no tools (no hands, legs, etc).

When we use tool calling we use them to empower the brain. But using normal API's the language model providers like OpenAI have no access to those tools.

With MCP they do. The brain they create can now have access to a lot of tools that the community builds directly _from_ llm, not through the apps.

This is here to make ChatGPT/Claude/etc _the gateway_ to AI rather than them just being API providers for other apps.

cruffle_duffle6• 1 year ago

What will the LLM use to call out to an OpenAPI system? Will it use a shell command like curl? How will it bind to the shell? How will the LLM’s host orchestrate that on the LLM’s behalf?

And who will define the credentials? And what is the URL? Oh, those are in the environment variables? How will the LLM get that info? Do I need to prompt the LLM all that info, wasting context window on minutia that has nothing to do with my task?

…if only there was a standard for that… I know! Maybe it can provide a structured way for the LLM to call curl and handle all the messy auth stuff and smooth over the edges between operating systems and stuff. Perhaps it can even think ahead and load the OpenAPI schema and provide a structured way to navigate such a large “context blowing” document so the LLM doesn’t have to use precious context window figuring it out? But at that point why not just provide the LLM with pre-built wrappers on top specifically for whatever problem domain the rest api is dealing with?

Maybe we can call this protocol MCP?

Because think about it. OpenAPI doesn’t help the LLM actually reach out and talk to the API. It still needs a way to do that. Which is precisely what MCP does.

jtrn2• 1 year ago

So why do I have to make an MCP server? Could it not just hook into the OpenAPI JSON spec?

And who will define the credentials? The OpenAPI spec defines the credentials. MCP doesn't even allow for credentials, it seems, for now. But I don't think deleting a requirement is a good thing in this instance. I would like to have an API that I could reach from anywhere on the net and could secure with, for instance, an API key.

And what is the URL? You have to define this for MCP also. For instance, in Cursor, you have to manually enter the endpoint with a key named "url."

How will the LLM get that info? This was shown to be easily 1.5 years ago with GPT's easy understanding of the OpenAPI spec and its ability to use any endpoint on the net as a tool.

I don't disagree that there needs to be a framework for using endpoints. But why can't it reach out to an OpenAPI endpoint? What do we gain from using a new "protocol"? I created a couple of MCP servers, and it just feels like going back 10 years in progress for creating and documenting web APIs.

Let me ask you this in reverse then: Have you created a basic API and used it as a tool in a GPT? And have you created an MCP server and added it to applications on your computer? If you have done both and still feel that there is something better with MCP, please tell, because I found MCP to be solving an issue that didn't need solving.

Create an awesome framework for reaching out to Web APIs and read the OpenAPI definition of the endpoint? GREAT! Enforce a new Web API standard that is much less capable than what we already have? Not so great.

You seem to miss that an MCP server IS an HTTP server already. It's not just safe to expose it to the net and contains a new and limited spec for how to document and set it up.

serbuvlad• 1 year ago

This article reads less like a criticism of MCP, the internal technical details of which I don't know that much about, and they make the subject of but a part of the srticle, but a general criticism of the general aspect of "protocol to allow LLM to run actions on services"

A large problem in this article stems from the fact that the LLM may take actions I do not want it to take. But there are clearly 2 types of actions the LLM can take: those I want it to take on it's own, and those I want it to take only after prompting me.

There may come a time when I want the LLM to run a business for me, but that time is not yet upon us. For now I do not even want to send an e-mail generated by AI without vetting it first.

But the author rejects the solution of simply prompting the user because "it’s easy to see why a user might fall into a pattern of auto-confirmation (or ‘YOLO-mode’) when most of their tools are harmless".

Sure, and people spend more on cards than they do with cash and more on credit cards than they do on debit cards.

But this is a psychological problem, not a technological one!

angusturner• 1 year ago

I have been developing with MCP for a few weeks now, making some small python and javascript servers to integrate with Claude Desktop.

I am yet to see a use case that wouldn't be better served with an HTTP API. I understand the need to standardize some conventions around this, but at the heart of it, all "tool" use boils down to: 1. an API endpoint to expose capabilities / report the API schema 2. other endpoints ("tools") to expose functionality

Want state? ("resources") - put a database or some random in-memory data structure behind an API endpoint. Want "prompts"? This is just a special case of a tool.

Fundamentally (like most everyone else experimenting with this tech), I need an API that returns some text and maybe images. So why did I just lose two days trying to debug the Python MCP SDK, and the fact that its stdio transport can't send more than a few KB without crashing the server?

If only there was a stateless way to communicate data between a client and a server, that could easily recover from and handle errors...

crabmusket2• 1 year ago

APIs aren't self describing by default, but it feels like a missed opportunity for REST and HATEOAS proponents to show the value in those approaches. I've always said REST is for human clients, and LLMs seem like they should be human enough for this kind of thing.

ikiris• 1 year ago

Rest is for people who thought xml was a good idea.

Xelynega4• 1 year ago

MCP is not self describing by default either.

I can implement a tool and not add it to the definitions, much like you can implement an API endpoint and not add it to the spec.

This is a documentation/code synchronization problem that is solved the same way for both MCP and REST, generate documentation from code.

codydkdc• 1 year ago

the only one of these points I personally care about is:

The protocol has a very LLM-friendly interface, but not always a human friendly one.

similar to the people asking "why not just use the API directly", I have another question: why not just use the CLI directly? LLMs are trained on natural language. CLIs are an extremely common solution for client/server interactions in a human-readable, human-writeable way (that can be easily traversed down subcommands)

for instance, instead of using the GitHub MCP server, why not just use the `gh` CLI? it's super easy to generate the help and feed it into the LLM, super easy to allow the user to inspect the command before running it, and already provides a sane exposure of the REST APIs. the human and the LLM can work in the same way, using the exact same interface

jacobr19• 1 year ago

FWIW - that is what claude code does, at least how I use it. It uses the BashTool to call `gh`

jappgar• 1 year ago

Amazing to see so many comments out here in support of a very new and very boring protocol.

I have to think the enthusiasm is coming mostly from the vibe-coding snakeoil salespeople that seem to be infecting every software company right now.

cruffle_duffle6• 1 year ago

Alternatively it’s actually pretty cool and useful and you just personally don’t have a use for it?

otabdeveloper44• 1 year ago

It's not "pretty cool", it's a shitty reimplementation of the OpenAPI spec made by NIH syndrome idiots.

mlenhard2• 1 year ago

One of the biggest issues I see, briefly discussed here, is how one MCP server tool's output can affect other tools later in the same message thread. To prevent this, there really needs to be sandboxing between tools. Invariant labs did this with tool descriptions [1], but I also achieved the same via MCP resource attachments[2]. It's a pretty major flaw exacerbated by the type of privilege and systems people are giving MCP servers access to.

This isn't necessarily the fault of the spec itself, but how most clients have implemented it allows for some pretty major prompt injections.

[1] https://invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp-security-notification-tool... [2] https://www.bernardiq.com/blog/resource-poisoning/

cyanydeez• 1 year ago

Isn't this basically a lot of hand waving that ends up being isomorphic to SQL injection?

Thats what we're talking about? A bunch of systems cobbled together where one could SQL inject at any point and there's basically zero observability?

mlenhard2• 1 year ago

Yeah, you aren't far off with SQL injection comparison. That being said it's not really a fault of the MCP spec, more so with current client implementations of it.

seanhunter• 1 year ago

Yes, and the people involved in all this stuff have also reinvented SQL injection in a different way in the prompt interface, since it's impossible[1] for the model to tell what parts of the prompt are trustworthy and what parts are tainted by user input, no matter what delimeters etc you try to use. This is because what the model sees is just a bunch of token numbers. You'd need to change how the encoding and decoding steps work and change how models are trained to introduce something akin to the placeholders that solve the sql injection problem.

Therefore it's possible to prompt inject and tool inject. So you could for example prompt inject to get a model to call your tool which then does an injection to get the user to run some untrustworthy code of your own devising.

[1] See the excellent series by Simon Willison on this https://simonwillison.net/series/prompt-injection/

superfreek• 1 year ago

Great point in the article about tools lacking output schemas. Makes reliable multi-step planning tough.

We based Xops (https://xops.net) on OpenRPC for this exact reason (disclosure: we are the OpenRPC founders). It requires defining the result schema, not just params, which helps plan how outputs connect to the any step's inputs. Feels necessary for building complex workflows and agents reliably.

Havoc• 1 year ago

Much like the early days of JS and APIs in general this is presumably going to need time to evolve and settle.

cynicalpeace• 1 year ago

MCP has a LangChain smell.

Doesn't solve a pressing problem that can't be solved via a few lines of code.

Overly abstract.

Tons of articles trying to explain its advantages, yet all somehow fail.

kordlessagain• 1 year ago

MCP is built on JSON-RPC 2.0. JSON-RPC 2.0 is a super lightweight, stateless protocol that lets a client and a server talk to each other using plain old JSON. It’s not tied to HTTP, but it often rides on it. It’s like the chill cousin of REST: no verbs, no URL gymnastics—just methods and parameters, passed as structured JSON.

MCP calls itself a “protocol,” but let’s be honest—it’s a framework description wrapped in protocol cosplay. Real protocols define message formats and transmission semantics across transport layers. JSON-RPC, for example, is dead simple, dead portable, and works no matter who implements it. MCP, on the other hand, bundles prompt templates, session logic, SDK-specific behaviors, and application conventions—all under the same umbrella.

As an example, I evidently need to install something called "uv", using a piped script pulled in from the Internet, to "run" the tool, which is done by putting this into a config file for Claude Desktop (which then completely hosed my Claude Desktop):

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "weather": {
        "command": "uv",
        "args": [
          "run",
          "--with",
          "fastmcp",
          "fastmcp",
          "run",
          "C:\\Users\\kord\\Code\\mcptest\\weather.py"
        ]
      }
    }
  }

They (the exuberant authors) do mention transport—stdio and HTTP with SSE—but that just highlights the confusion here we are seeing. A real protocol doesn’t care how it’s transported, or it defines the transport clearly. MCP tries to do both and ends up muddying the boundaries. And the auth situation? It waves toward OAuth2.1, but offers almost zero clarity on implementation, trust delegation, or actual enforcement. It’s a rats nest waiting to unravel once people start pushing for real-world deployments that involve state, identity, or external APIs with rate limits and abuse vectors.

This feels like yet another centralized spec written for one ecosystem (TypeScript AI crap), claiming universality without earning it.

And let’s talk about streaming vs formatting while we’re at it. MCP handwaves over the reality that content coming in from a stream (like SSE) has totally different requirements than a local response. When you’re streaming partials from a model and interleaving tool calls, you need a very well-defined contract for how to chunk, format, and parse responses—especially when tools return mid-stream or you’re trying to do anything interactive.

Right now, only a few clients are actually supported (Anthropic’s Claude, Copilot, OpenAI, and a couple local LLM projects). But that’s not a bug—it’s the feature. The clients are where the value capture is. If you can enforce that tools, prompts, and context management only work smoothly inside your shell, you keep devs and users corralled inside your experience. This isn’t open protocol territory; it’s marketing. Dev marketing dressed up as protocol design. Give them a “standard” so they don’t ask questions, then upsell them on hosted toolchains, orchestrators, and AI-native IDEs later. The LLM is the bait. The client is the business.

And yes, Claude helped write this, but it's exactly what I would say if I had an hour to type it out clearly.

pgt8• 1 year ago

MCP is just a transport + wire format with request/response lifecycle and most importantly: tool-level authorization.

The essay misses the biggest problem with MCP:

  1. it does not enable AI agents to functionally compose tools.

  2. MCP should not exist in the first place.

LLMs already know how to talk to every API that documents itself with OpenAPI specs, but the missing piece is authorization. Why not just let the AI make HTTP requests but apply authorization to endpoints? And indeed, people are wrapping existing APIs with thin MCP tools.

Personally, the most annoying part of MCP is the lack of support for streaming tool call results. Tool calls have a single request/response pair, which means long-running tool calls can't emit data as it becomes available – the client has to repeat a tool call multiple times to paginate. IMO, MCP could have used gRPC which is designed for streaming. Need an onComplete trigger.

I'm the author of Modex[^1], a Clojure MCP library, which is used by Datomic MCP[^2].

[^1]: Modex: Clojure MCP Library – https://github.com/theronic/modex

[^2]: Datomic MCP: Datomic MCP Server – https://github.com/theronic/datomic-mcp/

keithwhor• 1 year ago

I mean you don’t need gRPC. You can just treat all tool calls as SSEs themselves and you have streaming. HTTP is pretty robust.

pgt8• 1 year ago

HTTP Server-Sent Events (SSE) does not natively support batched streaming with explicit completion notifications in its core specification.

cruffle_duffle6• 1 year ago

There are plenty of things out there that don’t use OpenAPI. In fact most things aren’t.

Even if the universe was all OpenAPI, you’d still need a lower level protocol to define exactly how the LLM reaches out of the box and makes the OpenAPI call in the first place. That is what MCP does. It’s the protocol for calling tools.

It’s not perfect but it’s a start.

taeric3• 1 year ago

I mean... you aren't wrong that OpenAPI doesn't have universal coverage. This is true. Neither did WSDL and similar things before it.

I'm not entirely clear on why it make sense to jump in with a brand new thing, though? Why not start with OpenAPI?

pgt8• 1 year ago

AI can read docs, Swagger, OpenAI and READMEs, so MCP adds nothing here. All you need is an HTTP client with authorization for endpoints.

E.g. in Datomic MCP[^1], I simply tell the model that the tool calls datomic.api/q, and it writes correct Datomic Datalog queries while encoding arguments as EDN strings without any additional READMEs about how EDN works, because AI knows EDN.

And AI knows HTTP requests, it just needs an HTTP client, i.e. we don't need MCP.

So IMO, MCP is an Embrace, Extend (Extinguish?) strategy by Anthropic. The arguments that "foundational model providers don't want to deal with integration at HTTP-level" are uncompelling to me.

All you need is an HTTP client + SSE support + endpoint authz in the client + reasonable timeouts. The API docs will do the rest.

Raw TCP/UDP sockets more dangerous, but people will expose those over MCP anyway.

[^1]: https://github.com/theronic/datomic-mcp/blob/main/src/modex/...

resters• 1 year ago

1. it does not enable AI agents to functionally compose tools.

Is there something about the OpenAI tool calling spec that prevents this?

pgt8• 1 year ago

I haven't looked at the OpenAI tool calling spec, but the lack of return types in MCP, as reported by Erik Meijers, makes composition hard.

Additionally, the lack of typed encodings makes I/O unavoidable because the model has to interpret the schema of returned text values first to make sense of it before passing it as input to other tools. Makes it impossible to pre-compile transformations while you wait on tool results.

IMO endgame for MCP is to delete MCP and give AI access to a REPL with eval authorized at function-level.

This is why, in the age of AI, I am long dynamic languages like Clojure.

pgt8• 1 year ago

Previous thoughts on MCP, which I won't rehash here:

- "MCP is a schema, not a protocol" – https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1897908595720688111

- "PDDL is way more interesting than MCP" – https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1897911660448252049

- "The more I learn about MCP, the less I like it" https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1900795806678233141

- "Upon further reflection, MCP should not exist" https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1897760788116652065

- "in every new language, framework or paradigm, there is a guaranteed way to become famous in that community" – https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1897147862716457175

I don't know if it's taboo to link to twitter, but I ain't gonna copypasta all that.

kiitos5• 1 year ago

MCP is literally defined as a protocol.

It doesn't have anything to say about the transport layer, and certainly doesn't mandate stdio as a transport.

The main feature of MCP is auth

MCP has no auth features/capabilities.

I think you're tilting at windmills here.

mdaniel4• 1 year ago

I hadn't heard of PDDL before but to save others the click on x.com, this is the Xeet:

This PDDL planning example is much more interesting than what MCP purports to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_Domain_Definition_Lan...
Imagine a standard planning language for model interconnect that enables collaborative goal pursuit between models.
Maybe I'll make one.

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL• 1 year ago

I don't see the problem. I've just been using services with 3 - 10 verbs that the agent can use without adding any that can do harmful things. Even when they have no auth mechanism I can just put a temporary token in the URL.

K7mR2vZq• 1 year ago

Great post. The lack of an option for decentralized content moderation is concerning. While MCP might help with extreme content, its opaque nature, potential for mission creep, and consolidation of power could lead to unintended consequences for smaller platforms and free expression online.

emorning3• 1 year ago

Anybody remember OSGi?

I can imagine a plugin-based server where the plugins are applications and AIs that all use MCP to interact. The server would add a discovery protocol.

That seems like the perfect use for MCP.

CamperBob2• 1 year ago

TL,DR: "MCP is powerful enough to do useful things. That's not OK. Somebody might get hacked."

Everything wrong with MCP

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