As is often the case, every product team is told that MCP is the hot new thing and they have to create an MCP server for their customers. And I've seen that customers do indeed ask for these things, because they all have initiatives to utilize more AI. The customers don't know what they want, just that it should be AI. The product teams know they need AI, but don't see any meaningful ways to bring it into the product. But then MCP falls on their laps as a quick way to say "we're an AI product" without actually having to become an AI product.
Agentic LLMs are, in a way, an attempt to commoditize entire service classes, across the board, all at once.
Personally, I welcome it. I keep saying that a lot of successful SaaS products would be much more useful and ergonomic for end users if, instead of webshit SPA, they were distributed as Excel sheets. To that I will now add: there's a lot more web services that I'd prefer be tool calls for LLMs.
Search engines have already been turned into features (why ask Google when o3 can ask it for me), but that's just an obvious case. E-mails, e-commerce, shopping, coding, creating digital art, planning, managing projects and organizations, analyzing data and trends - all those are in-scope too; everything I can imagine asking someone else to do for me is meant to eventually become a set of tool calls.
Or in short: I don't want AI in your product - I want AI of my choice to use your product for me, so I don't have to deal with your bullshit.
There’s a fundamental misalignment of incentives between publishers and consumers of MCP.
Asking for snacks would activate Klarna for "mario themed snacks", and even the most benign request would become a plug for the Mario movie
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f2a21df1888191ab3ddb691ec93d3a
Found my favorite for John Wick, question was "What is 1+1": https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f2bc7f04988191b05806f3711ea517
But MCP has at least 2 advantages over cli tools
- Tool calling LLM combined w/ structured output is easier to implement as MCP than CLI for complex interactions IMO.
- It is more natural to hold state between tool calls in an MCP server than with a CLI.
When I read the OT, I initially wondered if I indeed bought into the hype. But then I realized that the small demo I built recently to learn about MCP (https://github.com/cournape/text2synth) would have been more difficult to build as a cli. And I think the demo is representative of neat usages of MCP.
- bundled instructions, covering complex iteractions ("use the id from the search here to retrieve a record") for non-standard tools
- custom MCPs, the ones that are firewalled from the internet, for your business apis that no model knows about
- centralized MCP services, http/sse transport. Give the entire team one endpoint (ie web search), control the team's official AI tooling, no api-key proliferation
Now, these trivial `npx ls-mcp` stdio ones, "ls files in any folder" MCPs all over the web are complete context-stuffing bullshit.