alt Hacker NewsHah, I made that same point last December: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/#the-...
> For a while it also felt like MCP was a convenient answer for companies that were under pressure to have “an AI strategy” but didn’t really know how to do that.
I've since come back to MCPs, because I want to build my own agents without first having to solve the problem of effectively sandboxing Bash.
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Yeah, from a design perspective MCP upsets me, because it’s a poorly designed standard and creating a good one could have been much easier.
But you’re right, since clients don’t have a nicely sandboxed “make api request” tool, it’s basically the way to go for a lot of use cases.
"without first having to solve the problem of effectively sandboxing Bash"
Hopefully this is easier as time goes on. Of course- also policy on the egress
What do you mean by sandboxing bash? Isn’t this about just having a tool like curl or Postman?
Implanting an MCP client in your agent code isn’t all that different from calling requests or whatever
MCP is one of those things that is "too good enough".
> without first having to solve the problem of effectively sandboxing Bash
"Sandboxing bash" is a problem that has been solved a zillion years ago already. Take your pick of any of the dozens of battle-proven solutions.
Understood but it seems like effectively sandboxing cash is a very very important problem for the industry to solve!
Would be a much more robust and general solution of the problem of controlling and auditing agentic access to sensitive information.