UTCP is a rule-based deterministic protocol for tool calling. No AI here. Agents can use the protocol, but its there to handle the stuff the AI shouldn't need to see.
> designing a truly universal description language for all possible service endpoint types and protocols is a hard (arguably impossible) problem
Fair enough, but when restricting yourself to the problem of tool calling, giving the AI the ability to call APIs in a simplified way, rather than inventing a new communication protocol like MCP, is, in a lot of cases, better.
Agreed! Right now, there's only one way to do tool calling, and that's MCP. I'm not happy with MCP, so I want alternatives so in the end we can all choose or create the best option. We're talking about the infrastructure of the future right now, and I dont want to rebuild everything that works, just because MCP told be to.
Right now theres is only one option available for people creating agents, that lets the users of those agents add capabilities for the agents through tools.
Its MCP. And to be honest, its not great, because its very opinionated, and requires an internet-wide infrastructure rebuild. UTCP is the only other alternative. And it takes a light-weight approach, that instead of forcing extra abstraction layers, uses existing protocols
It's not about latency. It's about security and rebuilding existing infrastructure. There are plenty of communication protocols to get anything you can imagine done on the internet. We should use those and write our interfaces and wrappers using those, not MCP. That is what UTCP does. It allows agents to use existing infra, communication protocols and security.
Funnily enough, thats exactly what UTCP is. Its just a way to let your AI leverage existing APIs instead of doing any wrapper protocols (like MCP) for the tool call.
The protocol is only for discovery. It gets out of the way for the actual call
I'm the creator of the protocol. First of all this protocol is made as a completely open-source and community driven alternative to MCP. We're actively looking for contributors and general discussion to make this better.
We take a fundamentally different approach to MCP. Tool calling should be lightweight and stateless by default, and instead of using a middleman MCP server between the agent and the tool, UTCP proposes offering a manual at the beginning of the transaction and then getting out of the way, so the agent can communicate directly to existing endpoints.
This approach fixes a lot of problems with MCP and most significantly makes UTCP much easier to update and adopt as changes don't break the entire ecosystem (tool providers usually don't have to do almost anything).
Very happy to hear feedback and reach out on discord for discussions and contributions!