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mahboiyesterday at 5:05 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Somebody's got a case of Chesterton's Fence. They doesn't understand what MCP's for or how it's used, but they find it mildly irritating or unhelpful, so they demand it be removed.

Yeah that's me. Idk what MCP is really, just that there's always some auth issue with it and I've never actually needed it. Is it dead yet?


Replies

0xbadcafebeeyesterday at 1:39 PM

Think of MCP as a universal CLI tool for anything you can imagine running on a server (remote!). Even if you wanted to use a local CLI tool to call some remote server command, local CLI tools have different input/output formats, different commands/options, and those tools change over time. MCP doesn't change, it always tells the AI exactly how to call it, the calls always use the same format, it includes a standard, quite secure method of authentication, and it's all done in an AI-friendly way. And because of all of this, it uses less tokens, and has a much higher likelihood of success (e.g. AI tools failing to call CLI tools properly and looping trying to figure out the right arguments/input/output).

Now, if you don't care about authentication, don't care about wasted tokens, don't care about the AI screwing up CLI tool calls or needing to be trained on every one, and if you don't need to call something on a server, then MCP is useless to you.

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liroleroyesterday at 11:48 AM

[dead]