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Why do we need MCP?

Why do we need MCP?

10 pointsby jwally15 comments

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  • Hacker News
  • Whats an mcp ? Mcp connectors Iv heard of
    by legalwarrior
  • From my limited understanding, it’s basically an API, rewritten for us by AI agents. So the humans can consume your REST API, while the agents will use the MCP to effectively do the same thing.
    by al_borland
  • Probably covers most use cases and is a lot cheaper and safer.
    by jwally
  • Having a dedicated spec makes it easier for MCP client apps to implement some nice features out of the LLM loop (e.g. OAuth flow or elicitation ), some handy user facing features (e.g. prompts and resource), and some more advanced use-cases (like server sent notifications).

    But yeah, a lot of it (including tools) maps well to HTTP semantics. In fact, at work we implement our features as HTTP APIs, and we’ve built a framework that exposes them as MCP servers.

    by Antolius
  • Is anyone forcing you to use MCP? You don't need it. If you can't see the benefit of it, don't use it.
    by owebmaster
  • What’s the harm in being curious and seeing what you might be missing?
    by AznHisoka
  • It's why I asked the question. Maybe I missed something.
    by jwally
  • MCP and APIs are extremely similar, but MCP provides a common protocol that everyone can follow, so every agent can use the same protocol regardless of whether the backend uses REST, OpenAPI, or GraphQL. It will just work, and agents know how to crawl other MCPs; therefore, providing an MCP tool makes it much easier for an agent to develop a usage pattern.
    by poxlr
  • To add to this, MCPs usually focus on capabilities. This is especially useful in multi-hop situations.

    As an illustration, lets say I ask the agent to “Read the issue Bob posted today from Linear (issue tracker), pull relevant logs from DataDog (log tool) and suggest a fix”

    In the MCP world, my agent doesn’t have to spend tokens / time understanding APIs or the protocol (as the parent comment suggests). Instead, it relies on the tool provider for the best way to “read the issue” or “pull logs”.

    Same thing, in the API world, would usually involve multiple API hits (and possibly using the wrong APIs or params for them), interpreting the results and hitting few more APIs again.

    by hackeryogi
  • I use CLI tools for Git, Atlassian (ACLI), and Metabase, plus custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well at the moment for me.
    by vpk11
  • I run a few agents side by side and I've been going back and forth on whether to bother with MCP servers at all. I'm not clear on what each of those is doing in your loop though. Could you go into a bit more detail?
    by 20Cprogrammer