alt Hacker NewsThe premise of the article is that the Model Context Protocol (spelling it out to emphasize the core purpose) is inefficient in its current form. We can agree to that.
Now, does it mean agents don't need a protocol to connect to a server and discover its capabilities, tools, and distributed skills? I disagree.
> Agents with terminal access can replace most MCP servers
What should all other agents that don't have terminal access do?
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Aside from the actual protocol, it makes a lot of sense to have a standardized, discoverable protocol.
Because the alternative, as proposed in the article, is that an agent researches an API/CLI/UI, builds software to interact with it, and then runs that. Every time again. Not only very inefficient, it's unpredictable, and often slow.
Just last week I had an MCP that was down (my mistake) and the agent "decided" that in order to finish my request, it needed to create a python script, refactor that, debug that, and then use that, so it could access my notes (Joplin) over the API and write it's weekly update markdown there. Somehow the thread produced a python tool with over 400 lines of code, five files. It, at some point, even considered putting all that in a git repo. And went on a side-quest to run docker containers.
With the MCP, this job typically takes between $0.05 (Mistral) or $0.90 (Claude Opus). It now cost me $17.00. It took nearly 30 minutes. To write a note in Joplin!
MCPs, or any de-facto standard/pre-known protocol, makes operating on external tools and resources cheaper, faster and above all more predictable.
What you're describing, though, is that agents need a REST API. And I meant true REST rather than the JSON RPC APIs we've been building for 20+ years now.
Had we not abandoned REST we'd still have APIs that are self documenting and typed/schemaed. Bonus if browsers still supported XSLT, that same API could have been written in XML and only browsers wanting a visual representation would load HTML templates while agents could stick with the raw XML.
Also, terminal access is extremely powerful on its own. Why should an agent even get access to that? I see it as a potential violation of least privileges.