alt Hacker NewsI just find that e.g. cli tools scale naturally from tiny use cases (view 1 ticket) to big use cases (view 1000 tickets) and I don't have to have 2 ways of doing things.
Where I DO see MCPs getting actual use is when the auth story for something (looking at you slack, gmail, etc) is so gimped out that basically, regular people can't access data via CLI in any sane or reasonable way. You have to do an oauth dance involving app approvals that are specifically designed to create a walled garden of "blessed" integrations.
The MCP provider then helpfully pays the integration tax for you (how generous!) while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data.
As far as I can tell, that's the _actual_ sweet spot for MCPs. They're sort of a technology of control, providing you limited access to your own data, without letting you do arbitrary compute.
I understand this can be considered a feature if you're on the other side of the walled garden, or you're interested in certain kinds of enterprise control. As a programmer however I prefer working in open ecosystems where code isn't restricted because it's inconvenient to someone's business model.
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>while ensuring you can't do inconvenient things like say, bulk exporting your own data
I think this is the key; I want my analysts to be able to access 40% of the database they need to do their job, but not the other 60% parts that would allow them to dump the business-secrets part of the db, and start up business across the street. You can do this to some extent with roles etc but MCP in some ways is the data firewall as your last line of protection/auth.
The auth angle is pretty interesting here. I spend a fair amount of time helping nontechnical people set up AI workflows in Claude Cowork and MCP works pretty well for giving them an isolated external system that I can tightly control their workflow guardrails but also interestingly give them the freedom to treat what IS exposed as a generic api automation tool. That combined with skills lets these non technical people string together zapier like workflows in natural language which is absolutely huge for the level of agency and autonomy it awards these people. So I find it quite interesting for the use case of providing auth encapsulated API access to systems that would normally require an engineer to unlock. The story around “wrap this REST API into a controlled variant only for the end users use case and allow them to complete auth challenges in every which way” has been super useful. Some of my mcp servers go through an oauth challenge response, others provide them guidance to navigate to the system and generate an api key and paste it into the server on initial connection.