[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology

I think it's important for us to all understand that if we build a machine to do valuable reasoning, we cannot know a priori what it will tell us or what it will do.

One thing that some people may not realize is that right now there's a MASSIVE amount of effort duplication around developing something that could maybe end up looking like MCP. Everyone building an LLM agent (or pseudo-agent, or whatever) right now is writing a bunch of boilerplate for mapping between message formats, tool specification formats, prompt templating, etc.

Now, having said that, I do feel a little bit like there's a few mistakes being made by Anthropic here. The big one to me is that it seems like they've set the scope too big. For example, why are they shipping standalone clients and servers rather than client/server libraries for all the existing and wildly popular ways to fetch and serve HTTP? When I've seen similar mistakes made (e.g. by LangChain), I assume they're targeting brand new developers who don't realize that they just want to make some HTTP calls.

Another thing that I think adds to the confusion is that, while the boilerplate-ish stuff I mentioned above is annoying, what's REALLY annoying and actually hard is generating a series of contexts using variations of similar prompts in response to errors/anomalies/features detected in generated text. IMO this is how I define "prompt engineering" and it's the actual hard problem we have to solve. By naming the protocol the Model Context Protocol, I assumed they were solving prompt engineering problems (maybe by standardizing common prompting techniques like ReAct, CoT, etc).

Remote: preferred but not necessary

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Postgres, Docker, AWS, GitHub CI, Python, Elixir, Golang, Java

Résumé/CV: https://www.ktb.pub/dev/resume.pdf

Email: achilles@ktb.pub

I'm a full-stack developer with wide-ranging technical experience and strong general problem solving skills. Most recently I co-founded a startup, worked on it for a few years, and then took some time off to recharge, be with my family, and work on hobby projects. I'm most interested in, and in my opinion best suited for, the kind of fast-paced small-team environment you typically find in early-stage startups.

Edit, for a bit of context: If there's no good solution, the prototype I'm thinking is just a Twilio Voice API endpoint that pipes received calls' audio into S3.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011122

Points: 3

# Comments: 9

Edit: On a more serious note, this book actually changed the way I think in a very concrete (and positive) way. The book spurred me to start consciously reflecting on "what about X, specifically, is surprising" and/or "what about X, specifically, is confusing". It's impossible to quantify, but the habit has definitely, definitely, boosted my ability to disentangle complex situations and make better decisions.

IMO the first part of the book is peak cyberpunk vibes. In particular I read it almost like I would read poetry, late at night when I can't sleep, sometimes jumping back and forth between pages.