alt Hacker News> And the moment we, as an industry, settle on something sane, I will rip out the whole thing and adopt that, because MCP brings _nothing_ to the table that I could not do with a "proper" API using completely standard tooling.
100%. I suppose I understand MCP for user-side tooling but people seem to be reinventing the wheel because they don't understand REST. making REST requests with a well defined schema from an LLM is not all that hard.
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I find it kind of sad that now we finally have tooling which could make use of HATEOS[1] style REST APIs, which are technically self-documenting and in practice never really took off because you need to understand the API to write a client for it, everyone ran off and designed something else instead.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if the http calling abilities of LLMs end up killing MCP, or at least greatly reducing its use. If you train LLMs to start interacting with REST APIs as a great way to make them do more then a lot of the MCP use cases go away.
I don't even mind it existing, it's just the way it's presented/documented/talked about like it's some special novel important concept that baffles me, and I think makes it more confusing for developer newcomers (but fine or maybe even helpful for not-particularly-technical but AI-keen/'power' users).