No, but MCPs aren’t free to build either. So if you need to build an API on top, why would you build an MCP instead of using one of the existing standards that both LLMs and humans already know how to work with?
But the agent harness is still handling the session token for you either way. MCP might be an easy way for agent harness creators to abstract the issue away, but I don’t want to lose all REST conventions just to make it a little easier for them to write an agent harness.
It makes it harder for the LLM to understand what’s going on, not easier.
Yup. I’ve been using CLIs with skills that define some common workflows I use and then just tell Claude to use —help for understanding how to use it. Works perfectly and I end up writing the documentation in a way that I would for any other developer.
How do you manage auth for services that use OAuth?
I’ve been wrapping the agent’s curl calls in a small cli that handles the auth but I’m wondering if other people have come up with something lighter/more portable.
This is what I’ve been doing too. Give the LLM a link to an OAS for an API and let it use curl for everything after that. I don’t even wrap the API or use restish all, the LLM knows how to use curl well enough.
This lets me add quick skills that are essentially just: “this is the OAS link, this is how you store and use the authorization, this is when I want you to use it”. That combined with pointing it at the documentation for common workflows and usage examples, and it’s been great.
The only thing I’ve had trouble with is auth really. MCPs are treated as first class citizens by most model provider’s agents and trying to provide a shell-based alternative for hiding the secret credentials from the LLM has been difficult.
There's a "Lock" button in the app. If you press that, the scooter doesn't allow anyone else to start using it, but you still pay per minute that you aren't using it.
Though if you're in a popular area there is no need, you can just walk a minute or less and find another.