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Comment by firasd | Hacker News Reader

I guess if the agent is strongly trained to reach for the container then maybe

But let’s take my MCP clock for example if you ask ChatGPT what’s the time in Tokyo it’s not even gonna think of booting up the code interpreter. It’s gonna just do web search and give you the wrong time (I just tried it and there may be an OpenAI built in widget it pops up now—but again that’s a specific tool call with an iframe output not arbitrary code)

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Because there’s probably a tool call for web search, and a tool call for arbitrary code. There’s no discovery for the CLI tools it has available unless it has already chosen to run arbitrary code.

The point is that even web search should be a CLI tool, and all ChatGPT would know to do other than talk to you is how interact with a shell.

Then if you ask it what’s the time in Tokyo, it would likely reach for the POSIX date command, instead of web search, because both would be equally visible.

The amusing thing here though is that if we do high frequency container usage like you’re suggesting eventually we’re gonna reimplement MCP right. Cause then it’s like npx thiscommand —help (aka MCP tools/list) and then OAuth and all that ..

In the same vein, if we do evolve MCP to support composable tool calls and more tools, eventually we’ll reimplement Bash.

The difference is that we already have Bash :)

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