alt Hacker NewsHTTP was never an extraordinarily different protocol, there was really nothing to it from a technical perspective. What was important was it wrapped up a lot of the concepts from the various hypertext and linking protocols that existed into a standard that was widely supported. The standard and the compatibility across servers and clients made it important. This is generally true for protocols across the board. In fact very few standards protocols are particularly revolutionary from a technical perspective. That’s in many ways very much not the point.
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pyuser583 • today at 7:44 AM
The world would be a better place if Gopher had taken off instead.
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I don't think that this is a fair comparison. HTTP actually has a specification that you need to follow if you need the web to _work_ (or at least, look good). MCP and others on the other hand are just you explaining to the LLM how you want it to format its responses.
MCP is barely worth being called a protocol; LLMs are now smart enough to follow instructions however you give them. When I played around with creating my own tool-using agent, I specified the tools in YAML, and asked it to use custom tags to 'call' them. It worked just fine.
More critically, there's nothing stopping the LLM from _not_ obeying whatever it is you give it, especially as the context fills up and/or the user trying to break it, except its own training. There is no proper HTTP server that would give you invalid responses 'just because'. Yeah, you could wrap the agent in a function that calls it again and again if the response isn't properly formatted with whatever formatting error happened, but I don't think any sane person would call that 'following the protocol', as the only entity it makes happy is whoever you're buying tokens from.