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Comment by ijk | Hacker News Reader

Near as I can tell it's supposed to make calling other people's tools easier. But I don't want to spin up an entire server to invoke a calculator. So far it seems to make building my own local tools harder, unless there's some guidebook I'm missing.

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Your not spinning up a whole server lol, most MCP's can be run locally, and talked to over stdio, like their just apps that the LLM can call, what they talk to or do is up to the MCP writer, its easier to have a MCP that communicates what it can do and handles the back and forth, than writing a non-standard middleware to handle say calls to an API or handle using applescript, or vmware or something else...

I wish the documentation was clearer on that point; I went looking through their site and didn't see any examples that weren't oversimplified REST API calls. I imagine they might have updated it since then, or I missed something.

It's a protocol that doesn't dictate how you are calling the tool. You can use in-memory transport without needing to spin up a server. Your tool can just be a function, but with the flexibility of serving to other clients.

Are there any examples of that? All the documentation I saw seemed to be about building an MCP server, with very little about connecting an existing inference infrastructure to local functions.

For TypeScript you can refer to https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk/blob/...

There isn't much documentation available right now but you can ask coding agent eg. Claude Code to generate an example.

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