Understanding Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Several commenters expressed curiosity about the meaning and potential applications of MCP.
- "pizza" simply identified MCP as "Model Context Protocol."
- "dSebastien" shared personal notes on the subject: "I shared some notes about it here. Well worth exploring right now: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33.02+Content/Model+Context+Protocol+(MCP)"
- "DogRunner" provided a link to a YouTube video explaining MCP: "A simple explanation can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_NE6Pjv-E"
Potential Use Cases for MCP
The discussion extended beyond simply defining MCP to explore potential applications, especially in the context of LLMs and web interaction.
- "hi_hi" envisions MCP enabling a chat window to replace the entire website experience, tailoring information for specific contexts. They ask, "Would you know if it's possible to use this approach to constrain an LLM to only a specific context of information (For example, on the Microsoft site, any question related to CRMs would answer with information about Dynamics but never Salesforce)?"
- "wejick" inquired about how an agent might interact with MCP, suggesting it could complement or replace existing "Tools interfaces."
Cookie Management and Authenticated Web Scraping
A significant theme revolved around the challenge of using automated tools like Playwright with websites that require login and cookie management, particularly for scraping platforms like Twitter.
- "tomjen3" pointed out a limitation: "Cool, but playwright doesn’t use your cookies."
- "tomjen3" further elaborates on the core challenge: "Increasingly I want to stop spending time on twitter, but it’s also where the AI news drops first - and I can’t just scrape the data without being logged in. If there was a way to have the ai go ahead and gather the data for me, that would be great."
- "yonl" echoes the need for cookie support: "I would agree to this point as well." They also mention the desire for privacy and security, suggesting a preference for cookies to remain on-device. "Speaking of implementation, i don’t mind if a browser extension forward cookies from my browser to the automation (privacy and security is an issue of course, and i’d ideally want the cookies to not leave my device, but personally i’m okay with some trade off)."
- "omneity" offers a solution: "This is something I am building. Herd[0] gives you a puppeteer-like API over your own browser, in effect allowing you to use your session seamlessly for automation and data extraction (and avoid bot detection as a nice side effect) 0: https://herd.garden"