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Comment by neoden | Hacker News Reader

So much scepticism in the comments. I spent last week implementing an MCP server and I must say that "well-designed" is probably an overstatement. One of the principles behind MCP is that "an MCP server should be very easy to implement". I don't know, maybe it's a skill issue but it's not that easy at all. But what is important imo, is that so many eyes are looking in one direction right now. That means, it has good chances to have all the problems to be solved very quickly. And second, often it's so hard to gather a critical mass of attention around something to create an ecosystem but this is happening right now. I wish all the participants patience and luck)

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It's pretty easy if you just use the MCP Python library. You just put an annotation on a function and there's your tool. I was able to do it and it works great without me knowing anything about MCP. Maybe it's a different story if you actually need to know the protocol and implement more for yourself

Yes, I am using their Python SDK. But you can't just add MCP to your existing API server if it's not ready to async Python. Probably, you would need to deploy it as a separate server and make server-to-server to your API. Making authentication work with your corporate IAM provider is a path of trial and error — not all MCP hosts implement it the same way so you need to compare behaviours of multiple apps to decide if it's your setup that fails or bugs in VS Code or something like that. I haven't even started to think about the ability of a server to message back to the client to communicate with LLM, AFAIK modern clients don't support such a scenario yet, at least don't support it well.

So yes, adding a tool is trivial, adding an MCP server to your existing application might require some non-trivial work of probably unnecessary complexity.

We've done it before, it hasn't worked before and it's only a matter of years if not months before apps starting locking down the endpoints so ONLY chatgpt/claude/etc. servers can use them.

Interoperability means user portability. And no tech bro firm wants user portability, they want lock in and monopoly.

> One of the principles behind MCP is that "an MCP server should be very easy to implement".

I’m not familiar with the details but I would imagine that it’s more like:

”An MCP server which re-exposes an existing public/semi-public API should be easy to implement, with as few changes as possible to the original endpoint”

At least that’s the only way I can imagine getting traction.

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