The best thing about MCP is its almost impossible to use for most people except developers. Therefore ensuring our existence.

Don't believe me? Try connecting Blender to Codex.

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Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The lightly technical people I talk to have no problems getting it done.

Their secret, which is not very secret, is to ask the AI to help them set it up.

I think this might follow that bell curve meme where people on the unsophisticated and highly sophisticated ends of the curve are leveraging the LLM for MCP setup (and other routine tasks) while some in the middle are making it more complicated than it needs to be because they still think of it as outside the domain of AI-assisted work.

The biggest problem I see isn’t getting MCP set up, it’s people getting stuck using the wrong tools for the job. I’ve improved a lot of workflows by observing what someone is doing and suggesting a better tool for the job.

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skipants 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like I'm living in a different world than other people with my MCP experiences.

At my job we maintain an MCP for our admin portal/prod data and it's seen a lot of use. Our admin side was a mess to use so allowing admins to ask questions about prod data has been a huge help for everyone.

And for myself personally, connecting MCPs to Claude has also been an insanely huge productivity boost. It's really nice to just ask for a link to Datadog when I want to monitor some change I made, instead of trying to craft a query myself.

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spike021 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Multiple non-developer colleagues at my workplace are trying out all kinds of MCP connectors in their Claude instances. Maybe when MCP was mostly relegated to coding harnesses it was more of a developer's tool but things have changed a lot.

Also, Apple just announced their preview for new Siri AI capabilities and part of that is they seemingly are going to add MCP to apps (if developers of the apps want to) as tools, which would enable Siri to use functions of apps, similarly to Claude Desktop using functions of services through MCP tool calls.

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camcil 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

MCP honestly seems like something thrown in there to keep devs relevant.

Just like us to take something and limit it back to being useless until we implement the feature (tools).

The real "race to market" winners will just throw the credentials into the SQL connector and let 'er rip like a real man.

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Culonavirus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The real "race to market" winners will just throw the credentials into the SQL connector and let 'er rip like a real man.

That's what we started doing... and never looked back. Now we're thinking of exposing parts of the database in readonly mode to in-house staff (non-developers) so they can vibe code whatever the hell kind of tools they want...

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huntertwo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree - MCP just standardizes APIs to make it easier for LLM clients to consume them. Imagine if we had to use standard APIs - it would be more difficult to enable any single one. That’s why the labs instituted MCP.

	▲	otabdeveloper4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> MCP just standardizes APIs No it doesn't. It adds yet another Nth "API standardization" spec.

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JimmyBiscuit 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Don't believe me? Try connecting Blender to Codex.

Is it that bad? I have Blender connected to Claude (and my mind is quite blown by how great it is to use) and it was quite easy if you could follow the tutorial (the hardest part was reading that you have to click on something twice)

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francisofascii 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You might be right. I created a quick and dirty MCP server to expose my existing REST API calls. It doesn't work as well as I hoped. The AI client seems to have trouble determining the mix of MCP tools needed to fulfill a user's prompt, unless a specific tool is defined for that request. Maybe I am missing something.

	▲	jonathanlydall 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A “flaw” (if you will) of MCP is that some developers with a REST api background naively think it is similar and add tools for each discrete thing to be done. They also tend to put guidance for the LLMs in the description of each tool. Now a Claude/Codex/etc user installs a few MCP servers and before they know it their context is already largely used up with tool schemas and guidance before they’ve sent their first prompt. In response to this harnesses aggressively “hide” most of this to agents, so the agents land up doing best guesses on how to use tools, doing things like sending wrong argument names, etc. Turns out that a really effective strategy to deal with this is to make two tools only, one to execute a script (eg in JS) and another on how to get guidance on how to craft a script. When an agent needs to use the tool, they look at the “help” and then craft JavaScript (something they’re already very good at). If the execute endpoint returns adequately descriptive errors with stack traces then the agent can pretty much always self fix their mistake. We worked this out for ourselves in our own product and we found out after that Cloudflare wrote a blog post on how they use the same strategy.
	▲	michaelscott an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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mmnfrdmcx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's becoming pretty mainstream, lots of (ordinary, non-dev) people connecting google docs/slides, notion, linear etc to their claude or cowork