The Future of MCPs

Interesting thoughts regarding MCPs being the future App Store/Platform. I don't know that I agree but I don't necessarily disagree either. Time will certainly tell.

To me, MCP feels more like an implementation detail, not something that most people would ever use directly. I would expect that the future would be some app distributed through existing channels, which bundles the MCP client into it, then uses a server-side component (run by the vendor of course) to get the real work done. As much as I like the idea of people installing the servers locally, that future seems like a Linux nerd/self hosted type of activity. I just can't imagine a typical mac or windows non-power-user installing one directly. Just the idea that they would need to install "two apps" is enough to confuse them immensely. It's possible some might bundle the server too and run it locally as needed, but even in that case I think MCP is completely invisible to the user.

MCP might be one of the few technology pieces where more articles have been written about it than the actual use-cases being built.

It is like the ERC20 era all over again.

> Think of MCPs as standardized APIs—connectors between external data sources or applications and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude.

This is incorrect.

MCP is Model Context Protocol.

You didn't "build an MCP", you implemented an MCP server. Lighttpd is not "an HTTP", it's an HTTP server. wget is also not "an HTTP", it's an HTTP client. Lighttpd and wget are different enough that it's useful to make that distinction clear when labeling them.

dnsmasq is not "a DHCP", it's a DHCP server.

This distinction also matters because it is certain that we will see further protocol iterations so we will indeed have multiple different MCPs that may or may not be compatible.

If LLMs are so smart, why do they need a custom "MCP" format to what's commonly known as a normal API? Why can't they just call normal APIs?

Extending this thought: why would there be any difference between offering data behind an API, and offering data behind a "MCP api"? At the end of the day, the underlying data will be the same (weather, stock market info, logs, whatever), it seems LLMs just needs this to be "standardized", otherwise it doesn't get it (?).

Furthermore..! LLMs can already crawl web pages just fine using (true) restful technologies. So why would there be need for other, new, special APIs when it's enough to expose the same data on a normal website?

I don't get it.

My prediction: there will be no standard protocol, clients will do whatever works for them, and devs will do whatever it takes to be installable on those clients. Just like mobile.

>>MCP Affiliate Shopping Engines

As someone else once said, I want a Grocery Shopping Engine. "Here's my shopping list, taking into consideration delivery times and costs, please buy this for the lowest cost from any combination of supermarkets and deliver by day after tomorrow at the latest."

If MCPs gave the LLMs a window into all the major supermarkets home shopping sites that looks like it's a step closer.

MCP is perhaps the biggest attack vector I've seen people willingly adopt simply for FOMO. Nothing about implementing it is defined or tractable. Even logging its use is extremely complicated.

MCP in this context means "Model Context Protocol"

I thought it might be "managed cloud providers", but perhaps I'm too optimistic for a change

Anyone else explored a plugin approach to bundle tools with the client? I started down that path long before MCP was a thing. I do plan to add MCP and A2A support at some point. But for my program it's generally not necessary. You just go to the admin and install plugins with the tools. https://github.com/runvnc/mindroot

How does discovery work with MCP? Is there a way to make it fairly seamless?

If you're sold on MCP, what was your "wow" moment? I've read the docs and tinkered a bit but it was a decidedly "meh" experience personally. It seems very similar to ChatGPT Plugins, and that was a flop. I don't really like the fuzzy nature of the architecture, where I never know what server will be invoked. And I have to manually opt-in to each server I want to use? To be unexpectedly useful, it seems like I would have to opt-in to tens or hundreds of servers. Yet I've heard that clients start to struggle once you have more than 20 servers plugged in...? Please excuse any fundamental errors I've repeated here, if any...

Are there any open-source MCP 'app stores' currently available? I am considering building one for my employer. A place to host internally built MCPs. It would be useful to know if there is something already out there.

The Master Control Program has no future!

The future? MCP is fighting even to have a present.

My experience so far with MCP is also that this is not ready yet. There are a few working use cases, but generally this stuff is pretty raw.

MCPs tries too hard to signal XHR for AI, but nobody wants to earnestly deal with the consequences of AI interfacing in a wider context of mis-/disinformation, hallucination and generally letting it talk to stuff in a semi-unprompted manner.

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we’ve been building most of what OP has written about with https://mcp.run

We started doing this the day Anthropic released MCP in November last year. Our company has always been devoted to secure plug-in system technology having built Extism, a WebAssembly plugin framework.

We immediately saw MCP as the plugin system for AI and knew it would be significant, but were concerned about the security implications of running MCP servers from untrusted parties and using the STDIO transport which makes user systems vulnerable in ways we weren’t ok with.

So we built mcp.run which is a secure implementation of the protocol, running servers in fully isolated & portable wasm modules. They must be allow-listed to access files & network hosts, and cannot access any part of your system without your explicit permission.

They also run everywhere. Each server (we call them servlets) on mcp.run is automatically available via SSE (soon HTTP streaming) as well as STDIO, but can also be embedded directly into your AI apps, no transport needed, and can run natively on mobile!

We are excited about MCP and glad so many are too - but we really need more security-oriented implementations before it’s too late and someone suffers a seriously bad exploit - which could tarnish the ecosystem for everyone.