There's a lot of people interested in forming some sort of memory layer around vendored LLM services. I don't think they realize how much impact a single error that disappears from your immediate attention can have on downstream performance. Now think of the accrual of those errors over time and your lack of ability to discern if it was service degradation or a bad prompt or a bad AGENTS.md OR now this "long term memory" or whatever. If this sort of feature will ever be viable, the service providers will offer the best solution only behind their API, optimized for their models and their infrastructure.
MCP doesn't make any sense to exist at this point in time. All you need is CLIs and existing service interfaces. We don't need a new protocol for something whose purpose is to make more protocols unnecessary
> Anthropic's more technical users inherently understand how LLMs work.
Yes, I too imagine these "more technical users" spamming rocketship and confetti emojis absolutely _celebrating_ the most toxic code contributions imaginable to some of the most important software out there in the world. Claude is the exact kind of engineer (by default) you don't want in your company. Whatever little reinforcement learning system/simulation they used to fine-tune their model is a mockery of what real software engineering is.
It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude specific app integrations, buried underneath some other 3rd party framework that abstracts it away and makes the "spec" irrelevant.
As long as MCP "just works" (and it does) and is relatively simple enough, then simply by being first, rather than being best, is what made it successful.
It's already gone so viral it's practically entrenched already, permanently. Everyone has invested too much time saying how much they love MCP. If we do find something cleaner it will still be called MCP, and it will be considered a 'variation' (new streaming approach maybe) on MCP rather than some competitor protocol replacing it. Maybe it will be called 'MCP 2.0' but it will be mostly the same and retain the MCP name for decades to come, I think.
MCP and Smithy aren’t comparable. Smithy is an internal tool used by almost every single team (it is used far, far more widely than just the SDK teams) at Amazon to define APIs and generate API servers/clients. It was released publicly because “why not?”, but I assure you that Amazon doesn’t care if you use it or not.
I'm not sure about his reasoning why, but I also personally have arrived at the conclusion this new Product is kind of just another new Games/Sports/Entertainment type service rather than some sort of "serious" technology
The two terms imply "engineering" varies along only one dimension. I personally don't find these terms useful or constructive for anything apart from "talking smack" about engineering decisions outside of your control, influence, or understanding.
It might make more sense when you don't simply view it as demonstration of scientific achievement. Demonstrating dominance in the field of rapidly delivering large payloads, at the press of a button, to anywhere on the surface of the earth (even the damn moon!) likely played/still plays an outsized role in game-theoretic political/military calculations aiming to deter existential threats.
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