MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices

30 yodon 7 8/9/2025, 2:42:10 PM julsimon.medium.com ↗

Comments (7)

abtinf · 24s ago
I wish someone would write a clear, crisp explanation for why MCP is needed over simply supporting swagger or proto.
zorked · 8m ago

  CORBA emerged in 1991 with another crucial insight: in heterogeneous environments, you can’t just “implement the protocol” in each language and hope for the best. The OMG IDL generated consistent bindings across C++, Java, Python, and more, ensuring that a C++ exception thrown by a server was properly caught and handled by a Java client. The generated bindings guaranteed that all languages saw identical interfaces, preventing subtle serialization differences.
Yes, CORBA was such a success.
mockingloris · 24m ago
I read this thrice: ...When OpenAI bills $50,000 for last month’s API usage, can you tell which department’s MCP tools drove that cost? Which specific tool calls? Which individual users or use cases?...

It seems to be a game of catch up for most things AI. That said, my school of thought is that certain technologies are just too big for them to be figured out early on - web frameworks, blockchain, ...

- the gap starts to shrink eventually. With AI, we'll just have to keep sharing ideas and caution like you have here. Such very interesting times we live in.

al2o3cr · 2h ago
IMO worrying about type-safety in the protocol when any string field in the reply can prompt-inject the calling LLM feels like putting a band-aid on a decapitation, but YMMV
ComputerGuru · 1h ago
They’re 100% orthogonal issues.
gjsman-1000 · 24m ago
… or we’ll just invent MCP 2.0.

On that note; some of these “best practices” arguably haven’t worked out. “Be conservative with what you send, liberal with what you receive” has turned even decent protocols into a dumpster fire, so why keep the charade going?

rcarmo · 13m ago
I’d rather we ditched MCP and used something that could leverage Swagger instead….