MCP gives me early days gRPC vibes - when the protocol felt heavy and the toolings had many sharp edges. Even today, after many rounds of improvements, people often eschew gRPC and Protobuf.

Similarly, my experience writing and working with MCPs has been quite underwhelming. It takes too long to write them and the workflow is kludgy. I hope Skills get adopted by other model vendors, as it feels like a much lighter way to save and checkout my prompts.

▲

andoando a day ago | parent [-]

What do you find difficult about writing MCPs? I havent worked much with them but it seems easy enough. I made an MCP that integrates with jenkins so I can deploy code from claude (not totally useful cause can just make a few cli commands), but still took like 10 mins and works flawlessly.

But I suppose yeah, why not just write clis and have an llm call them

▲

rednafi a day ago | parent [-]

Writing one off simple MCPs are quite easy but once you need to manage a fleet of them, it gets hairy.

- Writing manifests and schemas by hand takes too long for small or iterative tools. Even minor schema changes often require re-registration or manual syncing. There’s no good “just run this script and expose it” path yet.

- Running and testing an MCP locally is awkward. You don’t get fast iteration loops or rich error messages. When something fails, the debugging surface is too opaque - you end up guessing what part broke (manifest, transport, or tool logic).

- There’s no consistent registry, versioning, or discovery story. Sharing or updating MCPs across environments feels ad hoc, and you often have to wire everything manually each time.

With Skills you need none of them - instruct to invoke a tool and be done with it.

	▲	brazukadev a day ago \| parent [-]
		> - There’s no consistent registry, versioning, or discovery story. Sharing or updating MCPs across environments feels ad hoc, and you often have to wire everything manually each time. yes there is: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry and here you have frontends for the registry https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/d... Everything is new so we are all building it in real time. This used to be the most fun times for a developer: new tech, everybody excited, lots of new startups taking advantage of new platforms/protocols.