This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing

If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads.

People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.

MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem. It reminds me of those youtube channels that every 6 months say "This new programming language, framework, database, etc is the killer one", they make some todo app, then they post the same video with a new language completely forgetting they've done this already 6 times.

There is a lot of surface level iteration, but deep problems aren't being solved. Something in tech went very wrong at some point, and as soon as money men flood the field we get announcments like this. push out the next release, get my promo, jump to the next shiny tech company leaving nothing in their wake.

>> but deep problems aren't being solved

There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room.

You are now technologically a more progressed human.

> MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem

My fairly negative take on all of this has been that we’re writing more docs, creating more apis and generally doing a lot of work to make the AI work, that would’ve yielded the same results if we did it for people in the first place. Half my life has been spent trying to debug issues in complex systems that do not have those available.

What is a "deep problem" and what was the cadence with which we addressed these kinds of "deep problems" prior to 2023, when ChatGPT first went mainstream?

>they make some todo app, then they post the same video with a new language completely forgetting they've done this already 6 times

I don't see how this is bad. Technology makes iterative, marginal improvements over time. Someone may make a video tomorrow claiming a great new frontend framework, even though they made that exact video about Nextjs, or React before that, or Angular, or JQuery, or PHP, or HTML.

>Something in tech went very wrong at some point, and as soon as money men flood the field we get announcments like this

If it weren't for the massive money being poured into AI, we'd be stuck with GPT-3 and Claude 2. Sure, they release some duds in the tooling department (although I think Skills are good, actually) but it's hardly worthy of this systemic rot diagnosis you've given.

I do not feel the same way. This looks easy to use and useful. I don’t think every problem needs to be a ‘deep problem’. There’s so many practical steps to get to

> People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.

At a glance, this seems to be a practical approach to building up a personalized prompting stack based on the things I commonly do.

I’m excited about it.

Well, we're still early days and we don't know what works.

It might be superficial but it's still state of the art.

Hypothetically, AI coding could completely absorb all that surface level iteration & posturing.

If agentic coding of good quality becomes too cheap to meter, all that is left are the deep problems.

I'm not sure what you mean.

What is the "real problem"?

In the pursuit of making application development more productive, they ARE solving real problems with mcp servers, skills, custom prompts, etc...

The problems are context dilution, tool usage, and awareness outside of the llm model.

Yes, people should be building applications on top of this.

If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then?

As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?"

To actually respond: this isn't for the median user. This is for the 1% user to set up useful tools to sell to the median user.

These are all tools for advanced users of LLMs, I've already built a couple MCPs for clients... you might not have a use for them... but there are niches already getting a lot out of them

> People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.

For consumers, yes. In B2B scenarios more complexity is normal.