The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 77 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kant: Anthropic's MCP and explicit tool calling abstractions are stupid
“I think MCP and tools are stupid.”
Lopopolo: Bearish on MCP due to forced token injection and compaction issues
“MCPs I'm pretty bearish on because the harness forcibly injects all those tokens in the context and I don't really get a say over it. They mess with auto compaction. The agent can forget how to use the tool. There's probably only like, what, three calls in Pla…”
Ball: Complex sub-agent workflows will result in user hangovers
“A lot of the features what we see, you know, where people build like elaborate workflows, like I have my custom slash commands and they trigger custom Custom sub-agents and they in turn trigger custom MCP tool calls behind which again another model is doing in…”
Slack: MCP as user-facing tech creates high token costs and bad UX
“As a user facing technology, it is such a common failure mode where a user will go and add in some MCP servers. Auth is a huge pain, but let's say they get over that hurdle. Then they have, I don't know, 50 tools exposed that often are too low level granularit…”
Neubig: Anthropic's MCP Duplicates Existing APIs With Little Added Value
“We already have an API for GitHub. So why do we need an MCP for GitHub, right? You know, like GitHub has an API. The GitHub API is evolving. We can look up the GitHub API documentation. So it seems like kind of duplicated a little bit. And also they have a set…”
Yan: Practical multi-agent setups require isolated sandboxes without shared machines
“We've actually given Devon an MCP so they can just go arbitrarily message other Devons and create new Devons, et cetera. But I guess like it somehow creates like a really chaotic world in that sense. And so we, we've still found that most practical use on a da…”
Yan: Getting agent integrations right often requires bespoke builds over MCP
“The thing we found is, so like MCPs obviously it has been like, it's like really big explosion of, oh, you can go like integrate it with all these different things. But to actually get the integration right and get the right experience, oftentimes we found tha…”
Reggio: MCP belongs on conventional systems, not inter-agent communication
“I think of like the MCP and tool usage as being like the interface to all of our conventional imperative systems, not at the AI space.”
Nina Lopatina: Contextual AI shifts from MCP to direct API calls
“And I think for us, for me personally, like in my dynamic agent configs, I'm moving more toward API calls. And something a little bit more once I kind of maybe been able to prototype with an MCP server and figure out how I'm going to use this I think then you …”
Other agent protocols currently lack the adoption required for AAIF inclusion
“At least on the protocol side, like a defector standards. And I don't think any of the other protocols, it feels like they're not just there yet, but of course, if they get there, then we are like super open as long as they're like complementary to what's, wha…”
Hezarkhani: MCP is essentially just a three-letter word for API
“I just think that MCP is a three-letter word for API”
Ball: Custom MCP tools fail if workflows diverge from frontier training
“If I give it this other custom-made MCP that we built internally, and our processes don't map to anything that OpenAI and Anthropic have seen or trained for, it won't be used, and you won't get good results.”
Fanelli: MCP integrations cannibalize SaaS companies' own paid products
“I feel like in a way the MCPs are like, Cannibalizing the products themselves.”
Shah: MCP or an equivalent standard will be AI's next major unlock
“So I think MCP or something like it is going to be the next major unlock because it allows systems that don't know about each other, don't need to just decoupling of Like Sentry and whatever tools someone else was building.”
MCP Provides a Safer Permission Model Than CLIs by Preventing Token Exfiltration
“MCP inherently has a really strong permission model. Like, all you can do is call the tools. A CLI is a little bit murkier. It's like, can I access the API token? Are you, like, properly sort of, like, re-encrypting the token so it can't, like, exfiltrate it? …”
Rieseberg: Users reject MCP connectors due to auth friction and limitations
“You're noticing that a lot of people, especially as the models get better, a lot of people throw up their hands when it comes to MCP connectors and they say, I'm not gonna go through like 25 MCP connectors, click auth everywhere, and then like half of them don…”
Reggio: Multi-turn agent interaction beats treating sub-agents as single tool calls
“There's actually a lot of value in having like multi-turn conversations from like the orchestrator or the assistant to like the sub agent, whereas like, you know, a tool call is basically just like one RPC.”
Hill-Smith: Multi-tool MCP agent workflows barely work right now
“I would say that this stuff like barely works in fairness right now.”
Making return streams optional in Streamable HTTP was an MCP design mistake
“We got wrong that. We made a lot of things optional for the clients to do. Like you can, the client can connect and open this return stream from the server, but it doesn't have to. And the reality is, is no client does it because it's optional. And so a lot of…”
MCP currently lacks authentication for mutually unknown clients and servers
“But if the client and the server don't know each other, we just don't have a good solution for now.”
Enterprise MCP adoption is growing much faster internally than publicly visible
“In big enterprises, you see MCP everywhere. And it's actually way growing way faster than you would think because it's mostly internal to companies and without people seeing it.”
Skills supply vertical domain expertise while MCP provides horizontal system connectivity
“What skills do, they like, they give you the domain knowledge for like a specific Set of tasks, like how you are, how you behave, how should the model behave as a data scientist, or how should the model this behave as an accountant or whatever. But MCP gives y…”
Google and Microsoft are already running MCP at millions of requests
“And we know from like some companies like the Googles of the world, the Microsoft of the world, they're doing MCP at a scale that I can't tell you the numbers, but it's like in the million of requests.”
MCP strictly handles obtaining context, leaving selection and retention to applications
“And I think MCP I always see is like back to like, it's an application layer protocol. That's just how you obtain the context, how you select the context that the problem for the application. And that's the problem all the agent applications will have at the e…”
Yegge: Agents handle MCP better by writing code than direct tool calls
“The agents can't call MCP very effectively because they don't have any training on tool calls, but they have plenty of training on writing code, so you tell them don't call the tool, write code to call the tool, and they do way better with it, right?”
Swyx: MCP specification includes features beyond simple API wrappers
“I will defend MCP in the sense that, like, there actually are other parts of the spec that are not just API wrappers, but people just comparatively don't use them as much, but I think it's a little unfair to MCP, the whole protocol”
Anthropic's MCP Has Won as the De Facto AI Interop Standard
“Now it's like basically kind of de facto one as the interop layer for all the labs and all the models.”
Webster: Most corporate MCP implementations are just glorified API wrappers
“The way that a lot of corporates are implementing MCP is just like a glorified API wrapper, not, not like super innovative just kind of checking the box.”
Rizwan: AI ecosystem will converge around an official Anthropic MCP registry
“I think the entire ecosystem will just converge around whatever they do. They just have such good distribution and they're, yeah.”
Vasek Mlejnsky: Comparing MCP to email protocols is far-fetched
“I see a lot of people, like, comparing to email protocols and such, which seems a little bit far-stretched to me at this current moment.”
Shah: MCP provides distinct value above OpenAPI for LLM workflows
“I do think MCP as a pro adds value above open API. It's yeah, just because it solves this particular thing. And if we had come to the world, which we have, like, it's like, Hey, we already have open API. It's like, if that were good enough for the universe wou…”
Kozlov: Protocols like MCP will eventually replace browser-based AI agents
“Especially with people building agents, I think it's kind of funny because it's a bit, to me, the anthropomorphification of agents, where it's like, we humans use browsers, so my agent is going to use a browser, but eventually I think that will get replaced wi…”
Agarwal: MCP will become standard way agents connect to services
“I think the future of agents, the way they connect to different services is going to be MCP.”
Nathan: Sub-agents and tool calling significantly raise MCP execution ceiling
“It's very possible that there's a, the ceiling on what can be done, you know, with MCPs and like calling out to these server-friendly services has been raised substantially.”
Notion Bypasses Third-Party MCP Search to Maintain Internal Quality Control
“There are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we want to add more high touch to quality. I think search and agentic find is like the largest instance of that, where we have slack and linear and JIRA search and notion that is not using necess…”
Executing Deterministic Code via CLI Avoids Recurring LLM Token Fees From MCP
“And so if we can have our agents properly execute code that calls on CLI deterministically, it's a one time cost, right? Versus constantly having a language model integrate with an MCP over and over and over and paying those like repeated token fees.”
MCP Lacks a Trigger Protocol, Forcing Notion to Build Custom Trigger Infrastructure
“MCP is a really great way to gain access to tools. Works really well. But you just looked at the trigger UI, for example, there's no trigger protocol. And so those are things we had to build ourselves.”
Nina Lopatina: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol heavily drives context engineering
“I think MCP has been a huge driver of context engineering.”
Passing raw OpenAPI specifications directly to LLMs bloats context and causes confusion
“If you put that into a model, like you will have a lot of bloat there too, right? Actually way worse. And funny enough, when people try to like map one to one things, often the model gets slightly confused because You have like search by name, search by ID, se…”
Underlying LLMs are technically completely uninvolved in the Model Context Protocol
“MCP is a protocol between the AI application and like servers, right? So the model is actually technically not involved in MCP.”
Anthropic remains fully committed to MCP following its foundation donation
“Like the commitment of Anthropic is the same, right? I'm still, We still have the same people I'm helping with the SDKs. We're still super committed in our products to MCP. I'm still the lead core maintainer. Nothing has actually changed.”
The vast majority of current MCP usage is for context, not actions
“Most people use it for context. I think that's the vast majority of usage.”
Anthropic and OpenAI are collaborating to build a unified AI UI standard
“And now one thing we just announced three weeks ago on the MCP blog is that we're actually working with all, all two of them together to build like a common standard.”
MCP is governed by a core maintainer group of eight people
“And so that's why we run MCP as like a really traditional open source project with like a core maintainer group of like eight people that basically decide everything. And then like input from everybody else. Like we get input and people can make suggestions an…”
Anthropic created MCP so rapidly expanding internal teams could build integrations independently
“MCP before we even open source it was born of the idea of like, I'm in a company that is growing crazy. I'm in the development side of things, development tooling side of things. I will grow slower than the rest. How can I build something that they can all bui…”
Block's Goose was the first open-source agent to integrate MCP
“Goose was the first open source agent interface or agent that reached out to us and worked with us to integrate MCP. And I think Rad is actually like technically the first non-anthropic contributor to MCP ever on like day two or something like that, like very,…”
MCP must enable inherently stateful agents with long-term client-server communication
“MCP should also enable agents, and agents are inherently somewhat stateful, and there's some form of, like, long-term communication going between, like, the client and the server, and so we always looked for something like that.”
Zemlin: MCP and AAIF adoption will move ten times faster than Kubernetes
“I think there's a somewhat similar situation here with the caveat of saying, like, 10 times faster. Like, just day one, so much momentum around MCP. So much interest in this. And then also, 10 years of CNCF to sort of teach the developer community and the vend…”