There's no interop between video conferences services, no BYO-video-conferencing app, why would this be any different? It took government regulation to allow telephones other than those provided by the phone company to be plugged into the phone network. Can't control you or usage if they just provide dumb pipes/interfaces that anyone's tool and interact with.

I think this is basically the motivation behind MCP servers, so you're in good company.

But I've spoken with many people at companies who've decided to add an in-UI agent to their apps, and I don't think this trend will persist. Absolutely AI/agents will increasingly become a major component of interfaces, but the current common incarnation of "Clippy for X" feels like a kludged bridge between an app that was not designed from first principles for agents (and often was poorly designed for humans) and the impulse to be "AI native".

From my experience, some of the most successful niches for this sort of UI so far have been in apps that were already well suited to it. I'm thinking specifically about analytics/dashboarding/"this is a portal for you to query things easily" software. They already started with a lot of the elements you want: visible provenance of the agents actions via the queries it writes, a malleable interface that you already expect to be customizable and ephemeral, and most importantly, "navigation" that is genuinely difficult for many users (in the sense that "navigating" can mean "querying specific data"). The agent provides a ton of value to users and its actions are intuitive and legible.

But the agents you see right now in a lot of apps that do things like navigate you to the right page by... sending you a link, which you could have clicked from the navbar? Or worse, which hijack your navigation and throw you on a page you're unfamiliar with, and where you have no sense of place or how to make your way to/from? I don't think they're particularly long for this world.

> provide the user/customer with an interface to an AI that can do things for the user

This is exactly what MCP is. But the reality is it will likely be about as popular as browser extensions and most normies will avoid.

Simplifying UX at the cost of personal control is inevitable because not everyone wants to think about tool selection and coordination. But maybe we can angle the future toward "tool bundles" that interoperate well or (if we are dreaming) mandate models remain accessible by any harness, which none of the players want but would be best for users and ecosystem development.

So I actually struggled with this recently (2 months ago). My "vision" was to have customers BYO agent and provide a secure MCP with an in-app (forced) approval gate for sensitive operations. But everytime I described to one of my clients, how they could bring their own ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, w/e, I got blank stares.

So now I'm building (already have done so mostly) cheap ZDR models into the application. I'm trying to build them in a way that I would want to use them, so a less "I'll be your AI today!" help bubble, but who's kidding... At least they aren't just customer pacifiers that use the help system, but actually can act on behalf of the user.

After which I'll end up building the MCP, but for power users, hopefully leveraging much of the same work. It's worth noting that MCPs have way too much friction still. It's gotten a lot easier recently (very recently) to bring your own custom MCP with Claude, but ChatGPT is more work, and restrictive (specific account types or submitted MCP apps) for the end user and I don't even know what Google wants at this point... It's a bit messy. IMO they are all dropping the ball (except Claude, which has taken the best approach).

I think we might be in this interim state that requires us to build ALL of the UIs, to address ALL of the users (Human responsively and Clankers), and it's a bit painful. If I was "the user" myself, then I would just want a CLI w/ OAUTH with clear documentation, that an agent could use (how is this worse than MCP?). But I'm not my own customer. That being said... I probably WILL build this version to scratch my own itch and bet on the future.

I don’t think that will happen. It sounds good, and I would like it if things operated that way - but from the company perspective how do they, for example, have a tool call that gives the customer a discount, without it getting used when it shouldn’t?

Companies want ai to replace human customer service decision making, which means it can’t just be an api that an external agent can interact with, because it needs private knowledge of company processes and access to capabilities that are abusable.

But we’re already at the point where if you manage to talk to a human, mostly you end up speaking to someone with no actual power to resolve your issue - so i think basically the future is just going to suck

Companies will do whatever creates the most lock-in for the user and generates the most profit for themselves.

Ask yourself what's in their best interest as a business? That's probably what they'll do.