alt Hacker NewsWhat interactions with internal tools? If you can answer that question then the clankers can help you write a deterministic program for that same interaction and you only spend the tokens once.
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Yes, having LLMs write deterministic programs is still an under used solution.
Less token spend, lower latency, more predictable results compared to having the LLM perform the task directly every time.
Yeah that's a good idea. Then we should standardize these tools and find an easy way for agents to discover and use them. ... Oh wait
Yeah. Like I had Claude code write an upload Slab script, and a few linear integration scripts, now it just runs these to interact with those systems. I had it write a redshift proxy that doesn’t take login creds and is just a logging read only account but it can just write sql to research to its hearts content (some columns hashed on replies) and I don’t need much trust but I get a lot of good analysis and verification done.
I've been doing this myself but it's been extremely hard to get buy-in from the rest of the org. They keep churning MCPs for deterministic interactions while I have tons of little tools written by clankers, not only for clanker-use but also for my own use when needed.
Best of both worlds in my view.
> If you can answer that question then the clankers can help you write a deterministic program for that same interaction and you only spend the tokens once.
The MCP is the deterministic program.
You need to take a step back and look at the problem you're discussing. What's exactly this MCP thing? It's a protocol to allow agents and coding assistants to access tools, services, and data sources, through a standardized interface.
It's the interface for your deterministic program. That's it.
Retrieving messages from Slack over MCP allows a shared read-only bot account accessible from the web browser and CLI. Setup is automated so users can just ask Claude to read them and do something.
Sharing Slack with Claude:
- Using the "normal" way, it shares too much, including privates messages.
- Using your own token, it doesn't work with Claude.AI or Cowork and requires you to go to slack.com to generate an application, tokens and more.
- Using a shared token, now you need context to tell Claude to retrieve it. It still doesn't work for non-Claude Code workflows. Rotation may break currently running workflows.