This article entirely misses the value that MCP brings today.
Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.
If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:
1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
4. Strong audit logging for what's going on
MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.
Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.
The article also doesn't contemplate the "skill distribution problem" which will be addressed by skills-over-mcp.
With the plain ol' API solution, you still need some way for agents to fetch the instructions provided by the service. Of course there are answers for this, but they are not standardized.
With MCP, all you have to do is provide the harness with a single URL and all context can be bootstrapped the same way for every service.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.
If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:
1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
4. Strong audit logging for what's going on
MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.
Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.
anon84873628 · · focus · HN ↗
With the plain ol' API solution, you still need some way for agents to fetch the instructions provided by the service. Of course there are answers for this, but they are not standardized.
With MCP, all you have to do is provide the harness with a single URL and all context can be bootstrapped the same way for every service.