> The (only?) year of MCP

I like to believe, but MCP is quickly turning into an enterprise thing so I think it will stick around for good.

MitziMoto 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

MCP isn't going anywhere. Some developers can't seem to see past their terminal or dev environment when it comes to MCP. Skills, etc do not replace MCP and MCP is far more than just documentation searching.

MCP is a great way for an LLM to connect to an external system in a standardized way and immediately understand what tools it has available, when and how to use them, what their inputs and outputs are,etc.

For example, we built a custom MCP server for our CRM. Now our voice and chat agents that run on elevenlabs infrastructure can connect to our system with one endpoint, understand what actions it can take, and what information it needs to collect from the user to perform those actions.

I guess this could maybe be done with webhooks or an API spec with a well crafted prompt? Or if eleven labs provided an executable environment with tool calling? But at some point you're just reinventing a lot of the functionality you get for free from MCP, and all major LLMs seem to know how to use MCP already.

	▲	simonw 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I don't think I was particularly clear in that section. I don't think MCP is going to go away, but I do think it's unlikely to ever achieve the level of excitement it had in early 2025 again. If you're not building inside a code execution environment it's a very good option for plugging tools into LLMs, especially across different systems that support the same standard. But code execution environments are so much more powerful and flexible! I expect that once we come up with a robust, inexpensive way to run a little Bash environment - I'm still hoping WebAssembly gets us there - there will be much less reason to use MCP even outside of coding agent setups.

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nrhrjrjrjtntbt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MCP or skills? Can a skill negate the need for MCP. In addition there was a YC startup who is looking at searching docs for LLMs or similar. I think MCP may be less needed once you have skills, openapi specs, and other things that LLMs can call directly.

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simonw 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it will stick around, but I don't think it will have another year where it's the hot thing it was back in January through May.

	▲	Alex-Programs 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I never quite got what was so "hot" about it. There seems to be an entire parallel ecosystem of corporates that are just begging to turn AI into PowerPoint slides so that they can mould it into a shape that's familiar.