Yeah, this deserves a quick explanation.

When a human is coding against a traditional API, it might be a bit annoying if the API has four or five similar-sounding endpoints that each have a dozen parameters, but it's ultimately not a showstopper. You just spend a little extra time in the API docs, do some Googling to see what people are using for similar use cases, decide which one to use (or try a couple and see which actually gets you what you want), commit it, and your script lives happily ever after.

When an AI is trying to make that decision at runtime, having a set of confusing tools can easily derail it. The MCP protocol doesn't have a step that allows it to say "wait, this MCP server is badly designed, let me do some Googling to figure out which tool people are using for similar use cases". So it'll just pick whichever ones seems most likely to be correct, and if it's wrong, then it's just wasted time and tokens and it needs to try the next option. Scaled up to thousands or millions of times a day, it's pretty significant.

There's a lot of MCP servers out there that are just lazy mappings from OpenAPI/Swagger specs, and it often (not always, to be fair) results in a clunky, confusing mess of tools.

You could get pretty far with a set of agent-focused routes mounted under e.g. an /agents path in your API.

There'd be a little extra friction compared to MCP – the agent would presumably have to find and download and read the OpenAPI/Swagger spec, and the auth story might be a little clunkier – but you could definitely do it, and I'm sure many people do.

Beyond that, there are a few concrete things MCP provides that I'm a fan of:

- first-class integration with LLM vendors/portals (Claude, ChatGPT, etc), where actual customers are frequently spending their time and attention

- UX support via the MCP Apps protocol extension (this hasn't really entered the zeitgeist yet, but I'm quite bullish on it)

- code mode (if using FastMCP)

- lots of flexibility on tool listings – it's trivial to completely show/hide tools based on access controls, versus having an AI repeatedly stumble into an API endpoint that its credentials aren't valid for

I could keep going, but the point is that while it's possible to use another tool for the job and get _something_ up and running, MCP (and FastMCP, as a great implementation) is purpose built for it, with a lot of little considerations to help out.

It's still middle-click in my muscle memory from the Windows XP days!

God, I used to be _really_ into Minesweeper.

One of the earliest games I made back in college was a 3D Minesweeper cube. I remember being really proud of one little detail – the detection and automatic resolution of ambiguous clues that would require guessing, which always annoyed the heck out of me in every other version of Minesweeper.

Oh, me too. Do you have your game still available somewhere?

Nah, this was 20 years ago or so! Would be fun to whip up a modern version though.

Yeah, you could certainly tell it to skip the Gemini image gen step and replace with generated SVG art, or an existing image, or just stick a longer description there, whatever. It's flexible.

I thought about the deterministic generation aspect, but there's no "random seed" equivalent for frontier LLMs to my knowledge that would guarantee deterministic output (even temperature=0 is still nondeterministic).

Wow. The guy who’s been thanklessly maintaining the project for 10+ years, with very little help, went way out of his way to produce a zero-reuse, ground-up reimplementation so that it could be MIT licensed... and the very-online copyleft crowd is crucifying him for it and telling him to kick rocks.

Unbelievable. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Mark Pilgrim isn't even the original author, he just ported the C version to Python and contributed nothing to it for the last 10 years.

If you take 5 minutes to look at the code you'll see that v7 works in a completely different way, it mostly uses machine learning models instead of heuristics. Even if you compare the UTF8 or UTF16 detection code you'll see that they have absolutely nothing in common.

Its just API compatible and the API is basically 3 functions.

If he had published this under a different name nobody would have challenged it.

Nothing to help out a thankless maintainer like allowing companies to use his work wholesale while contributing nothing back! Enjoy your nice things

Those claims were way, way after the fact. Like, 50+ years later. Zero documentation or contemporary evidence of ANY kind. The claim isn’t taken particularly seriously by historians.

Interesting that you’re getting downvoted. This passage also stuck out like a sore thumb to me – it’s like seeing some antivax stuff thrown into an otherwise serious discussion.

> Robert Maxwell, one of the architects of the for-profit scientific publishing scheme. When he later went into debt, he plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees’ pension funds. You may be familiar with his daughter and lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on to have a successful career in child trafficking.

Wow! Surprised that hasn't been mentioned here already. Jumped out to me immediately as a morbidly curious bit of trivia.

A good biography of Maxwell - "Fall" by John Preston.

And he apparently stole £763m...

That reminds me of the recent term "Epstein class". It seems more and more fitting.

Huge leap there in your conclusion. Looks like you’re hand-waving away the entire phenomenon of emergent properties.

I assume a lawyer took one look at the larger mission statement and told them to pare it way down.

A smaller, more concise statement means less surface area for the IRS to potentially object to / lower overall liability.

I'd love to know why their lawyers appear to hate apostrophes so much. The most recent one is:

> OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Many of the older ones skipped some but not all of the apostrophes too.

I imagine that apostrophes in legal writing are trouble, much like commas. It's too easy to shift or even drop one them by mistake, which can alter the the meaning of the whose sentence/section in unfortunate ways.

It's hard to believe that a LLM would make a mistake like this. It's literally called a Large Language Model.