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MCPs are Boring (or: Why we are losing the Sparkle of LLMs) - Manuel Odendahl
Takeaway
MCP is great plumbing but standardizing every LLM interaction as tool-calling discards the language-generative magic that made LLMs interesting.
Summary
- MCP collapses LLMs' generative magic into RPC plumbing — LLMs were exciting because they could produce arbitrary language; MCP just turns them back into structured function callers.
- Tool calling works because LLMs have read decades of code documenting tool use; the magic is in the language generation, not the schema mapping.
- Argues we lose creative emergent behavior when we constrain LLMs to MCP's rigid schema/tool contract.
- Calls for keeping space for language-native, non-RPC interactions instead of routing everything through MCP servers.
mcptool-usellm-apps
Original description
With the mainstream spread especially in coding and with agents, we are starting to imprison ourselves in little cargo culted boxes of what llms and agents are. I’ll hopefully show you a couple of ideas so you can delve deeper and learn to unleash and harness the shoggoth. You’re absolutely right – this is the talk you don’t want to miss! https://x.com/ProgramWithAi/status/1929226124019564993