Mid 30s and never heard of this. My brother hadn’t either. Absolutely wild bias of geopolitical history that something like this isn’t as engrained into western knowledge as concentration camps or eugenics.
I wrote the first commit for slice-ansi in 2015 to solve a baby problem for a cli framework I was building, and worked with Qix a little on the chalk org after it. It's wild looking back and seeing how these things creep in influence over time.
This is very naive. How many different APIs have you authenticated with and connected to? Just the big ones? What happens when the docs are wrong or incomplete?
> This is very naive. How many different APIs have you authenticated with and connected to? Just the big ones?
I mean, a lot? I have multiple times felt like that was my entire life for weeks or months on end during the past over three decades of doing software development...
(If we expand the scope a bit to network protocols, as opposed to just "APIs", I was even the person who first spiked nmap's protocol scanning and detection logic.)
To wit, I am one of those people who pretty much never use an SDK provided for an API: if I have to, I will rather reverse engineer the protocol using a disassembler.
(This then being part of why I've won millions of dollars in bug bounties, as part of my relentless drive to always operate at the lowest level presented to me.)
But, regardless, can we move past trying to attack my credibility on software, and shift back to more productive forms of analysis? (Why did this become so personal?!)
> What happens when the docs are wrong or incomplete?
If we posit that the documentation for the API is wrong, so we should this MCP description / wrapper, as both were written by the humans charged to enable this function.
And, of course, the real point is whether the task is easier than the thing we are trying to do... even writing a correct tree map is much harder than an API client.
^ Both of these arguments can be made by someone who doesn't even do software development, helping us try to understand why MCP is being hyped up as a new paradigm.
The success rate of this is impractically low. APIs are dirty, inconsistent things. Real-world connection to obscure APIs is a matter of hard sleuthing. Docs are wrong, endpoints are broken, auth is a nightmare. These APIs need to be massaged in advance and given a sanity-wrapper if you want any semblance of reliable success when a model calls them.
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