alt Hacker NewsYou don't need to aspire to use "MCP", but rather select some MCP servers that will be useful for you.
MCP servers basically expose pieces of the web/data that your LLM client has not been trained on. Maybe some private APIs, or internal data that isn't part of training data sets. Real-time data is another good use case.
This list has a lot of ideas:
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers?tab=readme-o...
I personally use the Kagi MCP server (allows an LLM client to execute searches against the Kagi search engine), and stochastic thinking/sequential thinking (some alternate thought patterns that help models escape the "valley of optimization" problem).
You can't tell Claude.md to "use the Kagi search engine"...it doesn't have an API key to do that. The MCP server basically just exposes the API. You're right, it's a lot less exciting than people make it sound. The future possibilities are where the excitement is at imo.
I'm excited about MCP more from a developer side, than from a user side. It really does feel like the first week of mobile apps still. Will it "revolutionize everything"? No, just like mobile apps didn't solve every problem (and made some worse).
I can see the value if I'm connecting to MCPs other people have written. Or sharing MCPs for a team.
As a solo dev though, I don't know of any MCPs that are really valuable to me that aren't more valuable exposed as a commandline tool. I have an "imagine" tool that creates/edits images and audio with various services available to it and guidance on how to use it, I have a "think" command that allows claude or (scripts claude or I write) to use different LLMs for different things and with a library of prompts for specialized tasks, etc. I don't have a kagi command but tbh that sounds useful and I may write a little wrapper for it so I can have it from the terminal too, rather than use an MCP.
(None of this is a complaint about MCP btw - just not sure if I'm missing anything that would make it also useful to me right now.)
Something I am interested in, is if claude code would do better with access to a language server. I love how claude produces most of it's diffs by string replace, rather than producing a diff and using an "apply model" like cursor does; but it seems it would be better off if it could "go to definition", "find references", and "rename" rather than use grep etc.
I do see one project in the list you linked to that seems like it's going for that. Although again I'm not sure if that's better than having a language server cli available.