Lack of Clarity and Informational Depth in the Article
Several commenters noted the article's vagueness and lack of concrete examples, suggesting it reads like an AI-generated text. This contributed to a general confusion about MCP's purpose and functionality.
- "The article comes across as a response from an LLM chat...the article is not particularly insightful." - fallinditch
- "The article has the same usb-c photo three times, but doesn't actually explain what it is, or how it works." - 1116574
- "The usb-c metaphor along with most of the text are lifted from the Anthropic documentation without attribution. I'm not impressed with the author." - doug_durham
- "This is not what two-way communication means." - crabmusket
MCP's Origin with Anthropic and Growing Adoption
The discussion highlights MCP's origins with Anthropic and its increasing adoption across various platforms, including GitHub, Stripe, and Slack. This emerging ecosystem is seen as a potential advantage and a driver for future development.
- "What the article doesn't say...is that this protocol was created by Anthropic but is being adopted more widely." - redm
- "Author here, good point! I should have mentioned that MCP was created by Anthropic but is seeing wider adoption." - norsak
- "It's rapidly adopted, with offerings from GitHub, Stripe, Slack, Google Maps, AirTable, etc. Many more non-official integrations are already out there. I expect this will only gain adoption over the coming year." - redm
MCP as a Tool for Extending AI Agent Applications
Many commenters emphasized that MCP's primary utility lies in extending the capabilities of AI agent applications like Claude Desktop and Cursor, rather than being a general-purpose tool for all AI interactions. If you're working directly with a model API, you might not need MCP. * "The most important thing for developers to understand when it comes to MCP: MCP is a protocol for dynamically loading additional capabilities into an AI application, e.g. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Highlight.ai etc..." - campbel * "If you are building your own applications, you can simply use 'Tools APIs' provided by the LLM directly." - campbel * "MCP is, realistically speaking, the extension API for Claude Desktop and Cursor... The article in this case is really confusing and unnecessary." - electroly
Practical Usefulness and Limitations
Several users expressed skepticism about the actual utility of existing MCP integrations, finding them either too complex or less efficient than existing tools. Concerns were raised regarding authentication and orchestration, which could limit its adoption in production environments. Others cited specific useful integrations they've developed or discovered.
- "It seems like MCP is a pretty cool protocol, but has anyone seen any actually useful integrations?" - starik36
- "So far I have not found anything useful." - gsibble
- "I've found BrowserTools MCP useful in my development workflow." - cloudking
- "It’s good as a means to get a quick POC running, for dev oriented use cases... The complete lack of auth consideration and the weird orchestration... make me doubt it’s going to get serious adoption in prod." - jjfoooo4
- "Most LLMs including Claude struggle using the @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem server - it's way too complex... A simple MCP Server with the SDKs can easily be less than 20 lines of code and be useful." - evalstate
MCP as a Standardized Convention akin to Package Managers
One insightful analogy compared MCP to package managers like npm or Python packages, highlighting its potential for standardizing how LLMs consume external capabilities. This perspective emphasizes the benefits of a unified convention for discovering and integrating tools, similar to published packages.
- "MCP simply describes convention on how to do it. The benefit is that you can write your own provider this way and if you follow this convention anybody can use it easily similarly to how people can use published packages (npm, python package etc.) that follow their publish/consume conventions." - mirekrusin
- "Their config manifest is like package.json's dependencies. Their init is like import resolution. Jsonrpc methods are like exported functions in package. Json schema declarations are like type declarations (ie. .d.ts) files... it's like npm for llm sessions." - mirekrusin
Preference for Direct UI or API Interaction over MCP
Some argued that building AI agents to interact with existing UIs or APIs would be more beneficial than introducing yet another interface like MCP. This highlights a concern that MCP might add unnecessary complexity when existing methods are already available.
- "If the goal is to build AI agents, I’d think the maximum utility from them would come from building agents that can use the UI that humans use. Or at the very least, the lesser available API. MCP is yet another interface to services when there’s already at least two out there available to use" - jameslk