Ask HN: What is the benefit of using MCP over a dictionary of functions?
I'm really confused with the MCP hype. I looked through their docs for quick start and it looks like more work and code than doing it simply with a dictionary. I feel I must be missing something here. Could someone please elaborate on why it is useful?
It's useful because it allows you to build generic tools for an LLM to call. If you want your customer service chatbot to be able to reset peoples' modems you could build a MCP tool for that. The LLM could recognize the tool, trigger it and then a call would be sent through MCP to your server which could call whatever API is needed to reset modems.
tl;dr
The spec and implementation orients towards stdio. We think this is a mistake and have created our own implementation that's backwards compatible with the spec but oriented towards production grade remote server.
MCP promises to be REST for LLMs. Imagine pointing your Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini directly at Gmail’s (hypothetical) MCP endpoint and asking it to organize your inbox today—no custom Python wrappers, no complicated API integrations, just simple, direct communication between LLMs and servers. When you expand this to Slack, WhatsApp, banking, Uber, Twilio, GitHub, and beyond, everything becomes interconnected and actionable by language models.
We just wrote a ton about this, after using it.
tl;dr The spec and implementation orients towards stdio. We think this is a mistake and have created our own implementation that's backwards compatible with the spec but oriented towards production grade remote server.
MCP promises to be REST for LLMs. Imagine pointing your Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini directly at Gmail’s (hypothetical) MCP endpoint and asking it to organize your inbox today—no custom Python wrappers, no complicated API integrations, just simple, direct communication between LLMs and servers. When you expand this to Slack, WhatsApp, banking, Uber, Twilio, GitHub, and beyond, everything becomes interconnected and actionable by language models.