Hi, author here! I fully agree with your comment here and that’s exactly my point in the post: Different tools that work great for different tasks. If anything, the post is a take against treating Skills + CLI as a zero-sum replacement for MCP, and calling MCP dead/outdated
Especially portability is just not possible with Skills+CLI (yet). I can use the same MCP servers through remote MCP on my phone, web, iPad, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral and so on, which I can’t do with Skills.
> MCP has severe context bloat just by starting a thread
Hi, author here. The “MCP has severe context bloat” problem has already been solved with tool discovery. Modern harnesses don’t load every single tool + their descriptions into the context on load, but use tool search to discover the tools lazily when they’re needed. You can further limit this by telling the LLM exactly which tool to load, the rest will stay unloaded / invisible
> But a worse problem is that the output of MCP goes straight into the context of the agent, rather than being piped somewhere else
This is semi-solved as agents and harnesses get smarter. Claude Code for example does discovery in subagents. So it spawns a sub-agent with a cheaper model that explores your codebase / environment (also through MCP) and provides a summary to the parent process. So the parent won’t get hit with the raw output log
> Claude Code for example does discovery in subagents.
but this still burns tokens needlessly in the subagent. if the agent could filter the mcp output using a cli (often jq, but sometimes something else), it could be more economical
maybe anthropic wants you to burn those tokens though
I just released Configmesh this week. It's a macOS app (with CLI companion) for e2e encrypted syncing and backing up of dotfiles and application configurations. You can sync for example stuff from ~/.config/, Application Support, *.plists, and so on, and add config sync to apps that don't support it natively
It started out as a cloud runner for small (mostly pure) composable javascript functions that we run for you in the cloud. So whenever you have some small code snippet that you want to run, you can hit up microfn.dev, paste your code and then plug it into wherever you want (pipe into the terminal, use from MCP, add a cron to it, add to Siri shortcuts, use for home automation, ping it with webhooks, etc)
Now we added agents support, so you can have autonomous AI agents take your functions and decide when to use them. Even better, you can hook microfn into a MCP and have anything that supports MCP use those functions as well!
Suppose you need a new thing that your agent should do, you could ask the agent (whether that's claude or cursor) to compose a new function, add it to microfn, then use it itself going forward!
microfn.dev wants to be a toolbox for composable small tools. Imagine a toolbox at home with a bunch of hammers and screw drivers that you collect, share, and use for different purposes.
Some actual examples:
- Pull data off services (twitter, etc)
- Store data from sensors somewhere
- Give agents tools to talk to your specific systems without needing to write an entire MCP
- Wrap complex logic (eg slack auth + sending a message to slack) into a function and add it to a Siri shortcut, so you can quickly send messages to a specific channel with a ping or curl
Still very early alpha (beta-ish), but very excited about this
A buddy and me have been working on https://microfn.dev for a while: A platform for creating, managing and composing tiny (micro) javascript functions and using them from different places like webhooks, cron, MCP or AI agents.
It's still very heavy in development but the gist is: Say you have a cool idea for something small you want to automate or run - instead of thinking about hosting, workers, lambdas and what not, you just open microfn, open the editor (or the function generator), write your function, hit save - done! All the complexity is tucked away on microfn, and your place of use just has to authenticate with microfn and nothing else. We run it for you and keep you productive.
Now you can use that function from anywhere: From the terminal, periodically with a cron, add it to an AI agent as skill, use it through an MCP (not released yet), through Siri shortcuts, share it with your friends and so on.
Say you want to have an agent or function that gets the weather and sends it through Telegram: You can either quickly generate 2 functions through the AI function generator that get the weather ("I want a function that gets the weather for Tokyo") and another one for sending a message on telegram, or you can use what's already available (such as https://microfn.dev/david/getweathertokyo). Equipping them to an agent works like in a video game - each function is a new "skill" or "tool" the agent can use, and if someone else already has some cool skills, you can fork them without needint to re-implement everything from scratch.
So like a toolbox full of small composable hammers and tools that can be used across different scenarios and places, to be plugged into existing workflows, automation or to even be used in autonomous agents and through MCP.
Again, super heavy in development and not really a 1.0 yet, more like an early alpha, but wanted to share here anyway. Feedback greatly appreciated!
Sounds neat, but please make testing first class - it should be easy to run functions locally, or to have the same code "infrastructure" run in dev/test/prod environments, etc
Love this, and love that you're using Elixir LiveView as well as Elixir with the Slack bot and lastly that you're based in Tokyo.
Followed you on Github, I'm looking at moving (back) to Japan in two years, likely to start a bootstrapped startup business and always good to have dev friends!
I blog about random bits and blobs in tech. Sometimes a review, sometimes trying out something new. Wanted to try and keep it interesting and not too fixated on one category.
Background was that we wanted to explore providing access to ChatGPT to employees at $company, but restrict access with Google OAuth using company email, and use the company OpenAI API key on the back. So I hacked together something quick that matches our requirements and we can self-host.
Definitely not AI generated. I wrote this during a non-internet flight. :)
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