I still think MCP is completely unnecessary (and have from the start). The article correctly points out where CLI > MCP but stops short on 2 points:

1. Documenting the interface without MCP. This problem is best solved by the use of Skills which can contain instructions for both CLIs and APIs (or any other integration). Agents only load the relevant details when needed. This also makes it easy to customize the docs for the specific cases you are working with and build skills that use a subset of the tools.

2. Regarding all of the centralization benefits attributed to remote MCPs - you can get the same benefits with a traditional centralized proxy as well. MCP doesn't inherently grant you any of those benefits. If I use AWS sso via CLI, boom all of my permissions are tied to my account, benefit from central management, and have all the observability benefits.

In my mind, use Skills to document what to do and benefit from targeted progressive disclosure, and use CLIs and REST APIs for the actual interaction with services.

    > This problem is best solved by the use of Skills which can contain instructions for both CLIs and APIs

You've just reversed the context benefits because the content of the skill...goes into context.

    > ...you can get the same benefits with a traditional centralized proxy as well. MCP doesn't inherently grant you any of those benefits. 

You've just rebuilt MCP...but bespoke, unstructured, and does not plug into industry tooling. MCP prompts are activated as `/` (slash) commands. MCP resources are activated as `@` (at) references. You can't do this with a proxy.

See the three .gifs at the end of the post to see how clients use MCP prompts and resources and definitely check the specification for these two.

so now you have almost all the parts of an mcp:

1. the tools 2. the instructions

just add an auth mechanism to it and you get mcp OR use mcp because it's a nice self contained package that contains all of it.

Beautiful work!

I was surprised by my own feelings at the end of the post. I kind of felt bad for the AI being "put down" in a weird way? Kinda like the feeling you get when you see a robot dog get kicked. Regardless, this has been a fun series to follow - thanks for sharing!

This is a feeling that will be exploited by billion dollar companies.

> This is a feeling that will be exploited by billion dollar companies.

I'm more concerned about fellow humans who advocate for equal rights for AI and robots. I hope I'm dead by the time that happens, if it happens.

Extensions have too many security risks for me. At this point I'd rather just vibe code my own extension than trust something with so much access and unpredictable ownership.

Great write-up! Thanks for sharing your journey

This model is awesome. I am building an infinite CYOA game and this was a drop-in replacement for my scene image generation. Faster, cheaper, and higher quality than what I was using before!

I've been really impressed with this model specifically because of how insanely cheap it is: https://replicate.com/ibm-granite/granite-vision-3.3-2b

I didn't expect IBM to be making relevant AI models but this thing is priced at $1 per 4,000,000 output tokens... I'm using it to transcribe handwritten input text and it works very well and super fast.

I'm the dev who made this:) We are looking into adding granite!

IBM and Nvidia speech to text models are also SOTA (according to HF leaderboard) and relatively lightweight. Replicate hosts those too, although some (like Parakeet) run easily on consumer GPU.

English only :( . it seems only 2 orders of magnitude larger models have support for ie greek :/

Thanks for this! Will test this model out because we do a lot of in between steps to get around the output token limits.

Super nice if it worked for our use case to simply get full output.

Not necessarily true! I think this interactive game applies: https://ncase.me/trust/

Asking ChatGPT Agent to try doing this is hilarious

This is exactly how I've been building software with AI lately. Getting AI to create a detailed plan with phases, then implement and use a separate AI to review the code. It works quite well! Curious to see how well it works when implemented directly in the IDE

At what point does the manager fire you and just let the AIs have at it ;)

Realistically, none of the models can function fully autonomously at this point. You still need a skilled human at the helm. However, AI tools definitely change how the human works. I find that I spend a lot less time thinking about easy things, and a lot more time thinking about hard things.

Basically, the AI fast forwards through the easy stuff and I just spend all day jumping directly from hard problem to hard problem.

Nah, you never voluntarily reduce headcount. Headcount is what keeps your salary coming. Any manager worth their salt would use this newfound productivity to infringe on other teams' domains: Hostile Takeover => More Headcount => Promotion. We'll see a lot of attempted empire building over the next couple years while all this gets sorted out.