YHK - yet another hacker news clone

MCP Explained

50 points rwilinski 52 minutes ago 18 comments

sputknick 43 minutes ago | parent

I couldn't find a github link, if anyone knows where to find the code for this, I'd like to modify it to make it a primer more friendly to non-technical managers.

Gshaheen 38 minutes ago | parent

it's a single page html file, just download it and use as input for what you want to do

nater5000 32 minutes ago | parent

Literally just give the link to Claude/GPT/etc. and it'll be able to replicate it easily. Hell, just loosely describe this as a text prompt and they'll probably nail it one shot. This is basically the "default" interactive explainer one-pager that all of these models generate.

sputknick 25 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

flyingsky 38 minutes ago | parent

I've been thinking alot about developer education and while I think this format is fun to fiddle with, I feel this(and a lot of technical learning resources) are no longer as valuable as they would have been in a world without LLMS. Now if I wanna learn something I ask claude and I can essentially build my knowledge incrementally, have it build animations iteratively, ask questions and essentially derive an understanding.

nater5000 30 minutes ago | parent

This is too dense. You might as well just post some Python code with sufficient comments to get the same point across. I think a nicely written article with a few diagrams would go a long way. Sometimes less is more.

MCPs don't really need this level of technical explanations (it's basically just a REST API with standardized endpoints for discovery aimed at agents), and AI agents really do lack in the taste dimension when it comes to these things.

jrmg 25 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this feels like one of those ‘explainers’ that feel like they are great to someone who already knows how the system works, but don’t actually work for newbies because they tacitly assume knowledge of the shape of the system that seems ‘obvious’ to someone steeped in it.

ddellacosta 28 minutes ago | parent

This is noisy slop that doesn't explain anything. Maybe try starting with a definition and a single diagram?

I swear when I see stuff like this is makes me depressed about the future of our industry. Pick up an Edward Tufte book or something and use your brain

brazukadev 22 minutes ago | parent

Yep. This is what we get when people that didn't study UX and product development have access to AI. They have good ideas, ask AI to generate it and can't see that the result is unbearable.

bibelo 21 minutes ago | parent

AI slop sorry

shaolinspirit 18 minutes ago | parent

mcp's are barely needed, good cli's are usually better

dominotw 15 minutes ago | parent

not this tired discusssion again

tedivm 12 minutes ago | parent

For coding agents I agree with you, but people are building for more than just developers now. The idea that a user facing service would give their agents shell access is kind of horrifying, as you then make it possible for prompt injection to mean a system take over.

MCP has its place. It should not be the default for many use cases, but if you need to expose specific tools in a secure way to agents that are not trusted to run shell commands then MCP is great. Developers need to think beyond their own use cases and consider architecture patterns if they're going to build, not just consume, AI systems.

jimbokun 15 minutes ago | parent

My take away from this overview is that MCP is just a synonym for JSON RPC.

ndriscoll 13 minutes ago | parent

Are MCP calls composable in e.g. codex yet? e.g. can a model pipe a jira MCP call to grep or sed, or at least into a file? Last I looked at MCP it was just a vastly worse version of curl, .netrc, and some short text files describing calls (which are themselves greppable). Is there anything useful beyond that that I'm missing?

zzbzq 8 minutes ago | parent

Last I checked it still doesn't. A skill that tells your client to call a CLI, and uses the help menus for progressive disclosure, benchmarks better. Developers noticed this immediately and there is sort of an anti-MCP sentiment. The protocol was probably largely conceived for non-coding agents run by non-coders.

In theory the agents could just natively know how to do this better, to get exactly the composability you want. In fact, you could probably just write a CLI mcp-caller and tell the agent to only call MCPs via that, and boom you're done.

Where MCP does come back into the picture even for coders is a more controlled way to break a sandbox.

What I will also say is it matters less and less. It's the usual bitter lesson. The models are just getting so much better all attempts to optimize everything are a drop in the bucket.