alt Hacker NewsThis article entirely misses the value that MCP brings today.
Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.
If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:
1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
4. Strong audit logging for what's going on
MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.
Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.
Replies
Exactly, in our company, we have built MCPs that simplifies interactions with internal tools we use a lot, which saves time and tokens. Sure, we could let the agent poke and fumble around with a not-so-ideal API too, but it makes sense to formalize it and give the agents quick access to what we want it to fetch 99% of the time.
Even if your agent has internet access, why waste tokens having it re-discover and re-implement its own API client each time? It doesn't make any sense.
A CLI doing all this is still a better UI for the agent though.
Were in a world where agents are more autonomous. Need stuff to be easier for agents and not humans
1. Control can be done via CLIs --> api key based access controls. We have been doing it forever. 2. I think this really only applies to Oauth based MCPs. Many server support api key based auth, stored as files --> security is still flawed imo. 3. This can be done via apis/clis too --> not something unique to MCP iimo 4. Same thing, not unique to MCP --> api servers can also be logged
MCP doesn't inherently make this easier. its still requires engineering maintaincence.