Comment

Comment by whoknowsidont

>Are you two talking at cross-purposes because you don't have a shared understanding of control and data flow?

No they're literally just skipping an entire step into how LLM's actually "use" MCP.

MCP is just a standard, largely for humans. LLM's do not give a singular fuck about it. Some might be fine tuned for it to decrease erroneous output, but at the end of the day it's just system prompts.

And respectfully, your example misunderstands what is going on:

>* The Claude API, which is more structured than "text in, text out".

>* The Claude LLM behind the API, which generates a response to a given prompt

No. That's not what "this" is. LLM's use MCP to discover tools they can call, aka function/tool calling. MCP is just an agreed upon format, it doesn't do anything magical; it's just a way of aligning the structure across companies, teams, and people.

There is not an "LLM behind the API", while a specific tool might implement its overall feature set using LLM's, that's totally irrelevant to what's being discussed and the principle point of contention.

Which is this: an LLM interacting with other tools via MCP still needs system prompts or fine tuning to do so. Both of those things are not predictable or deterministic. They will fail at some point in the future. That is indisputable. It is a matter of statistical certainty.

It's not up for debate. And an agreed upon standard between humans that ultimately just acts as convention is not going to change that.

It is GRAVELY concerning that so many people are trying to use technical jargon of which they clearly are ill-equipped to do so. The magic rules all.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton