EVERY SPOKEN WORD
25 min read · 5,131 words- 0:00 – 0:30
Introductions
- AAAlex Albert
Am I reading your status updates then in your Slack, and those are all Claude-generated? [laughs]
- MCMichael Cohen
I, yeah, I'm never, I'm never actually writing anything anymore. It's just all Claude.
- AAAlex Albert
I'm just reading Claude the whole time. [laughs]
- MCMichael Cohen
[laughs]
- AAAlex Albert
Okay, good to know. [upbeat music] Hey, I'm Alex. I lead Claude Relations here at Anthropic. Today, we're talking about MCP and the Claude API, and I'm joined by my colleagues.
- MCMichael Cohen
Hey, I'm Michael. I'm an engineer on the API team here at Anthropic.
- JWJohn Welsh
I'm John, and I work on the Model Context Protocol team here at Anthropic.
- 0:30 – 1:30
What is MCP?
- AAAlex Albert
To kick us off here today, uh, I really wanna give a high-level overview of just what is MCP.
- JWJohn Welsh
MCP is, uh, the Model Context Protocol, and, uh, it's a way of providing external context to models. And so if you have a chatbot, and you're in a conversation, the history of your conversation is your context, and the model only has the ability to see everything that you've typed in, um, which is really useful for some kinds of tasks like, "Help me solve this problem," or, "Write this thing." But sometimes Claude needs access to, um, things outside of its box, like it needs to be able to talk to the internet, or it needs to be able to reach out to a travel agency to book your flight.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm.
- JWJohn Welsh
And so that's kind of where MCP comes in. Like, it provides these external context to Claude so that it can take actions for you on your behalf in the outer world.
- AAAlex Albert
Right. Yeah, I've heard, I've heard a good analogy in the past of MCP being like the universal connector-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... between applications and the model.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah.
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm-hmm.
- AAAlex Albert
So a way for us to tie Claude into everything else that it might need access to, all the other data sources, tools,
- 1:30 – 2:50
The origins of MCP
- AAAlex Albert
everything-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah, definitely
- AAAlex Albert
... out there on the internet, basically. Why did we build this? What, what was kinda the intention? I mean, it seems useful to have these connections, but, like, why did we take that on specifically, and why make it a universal standard protocol?
- MCMichael Cohen
So I think as we were, um, starting to get further and further along in tool use and, uh, as Claude's capability, we were starting to notice that we were re-implementing a lot of the same capabilities in var-various different contexts. So my assistant that I had in my coding editor, um, had to get a web search tool associated with it-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, but so did claude.ai, and so did all these other surfaces where we want Claude to be able to interact with the outside world. And, uh, we figured it would be good to have a single unified protocol that, um, we can implement a set of functionalities once-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- MCMichael Cohen
... and, um, take that everywhere. So build it once and configure everywhere. So the same web search functionality that I might get on Claude Code, uh, will be the same web search functionality that I would get on claude.ai.
- AAAlex Albert
Okay, that makes sense, uh, creating that universal compatibility, basically, when we have tons of applications that might need these same connections. Um, now, our approach to MCP spec-specifically with open sourcing it was pretty different, I think, than a lot of other integration
- 2:50 – 5:00
Open sourcing MCP
- AAAlex Albert
paths that other companies were going down at the time. Why did we think to open source it? Like, what was kinda like the driving factor behind that?
- JWJohn Welsh
I think there's a lot of value in open standards to allow, uh, a wide network of, of engineers, companies, um, individuals to go and, um, build an ecosystem around something. And, uh, we could have gone and built the, uh, the Claude app connector that allows you to tie your things into Claude, but then, like, you end up with a really kind of bad, uh, user experience for if you're, if you're using multiple models. If, if I'm a company like Asana and I want to go connect, like, do I have to go implement my Claude connector and my OpenAI connector and my Groq connector and my Gemini connector? And that, that ends up being kind of a nightmare. And one of the things that we had noticed is that models having access to external context is, is kind of good for everyone. It's like a rising tide floats all boats type of situation.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm.
- JWJohn Welsh
And, uh, we had this internal protocol that was really valuable, um, for us standardizing our model interactions. And so we went and open sourced it as a, as a way of being like, "Hey, like, we found this useful. Maybe the world would find this useful also." And it got incredibly popular incredibly fast.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah.
- JWJohn Welsh
Like, it turns out a lot of people had had the same kind of need and jumped on it and started just hacking together. Even with, like, the minimum support, people started hacking together really incredible dev environments, and it kind of, like, boosted. I think it was the fastest-growing open source, like, protocol, like-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- JWJohn Welsh
... in history.
- AAAlex Albert
Wow.
- JWJohn Welsh
It's been, uh, truly kinda s-stratospheric growth in there, and there was, like, a m-massive need for it. Yeah, so we went and open sourced that, and since this has taken off, uh, it's truly succeeded our wildest dreams when we were releasing this, like, little specification. And so we've done a lot of work, um, as this is starting to move between a, a neat way for Anthropic, a project for Anthropic to go and get context to its models into an industry-defining standard, uh, like ecosystem. We've done a lot of work to go and move that into a proper open source-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- JWJohn Welsh
... foundation-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- JWJohn Welsh
... and,
- 5:00 – 6:15
Remote MCP support
- JWJohn Welsh
like, work with all the other providers and make MCP something that's durable and is here for the long term.
- AAAlex Albert
What is the lay of the land actually on MCP right now, both in terms of, like, the open source community, but also the technical spec itself? It's been, like, I guess almost a year, a little under a year since we first announced it, and I feel like a lot of folks still have kind of intuitions that were based in how it was, you know, earlier this year, in early 2025 or something around that, but the protocol's moving so fast, and things are changing. What's, like, the current state in your guys' mind of MCP?
- MCMichael Cohen
I feel like a big aha moment, for me at least, was, uh, when we released remote MCP support.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- MCMichael Cohen
Some of the initial quirks of the protocol were that you had to run everything effectively by yourself, um, which, um, prevented providers of MCP servers like Asana from, uh, being able to host their own servers that you could just access very, very quickly. Um, and it made the setup process very, very, yeah, clunky.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm.
- MCMichael Cohen
And, um, I think the, yeah, a very big step ch-change, in my opinion, was when we kind of provided first-class support for, um, remote-hosted MCP servers-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- MCMichael Cohen
... that drastically reduced the setup process-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, so that end users can just get started fairly quickly.
- AAAlex Albert
And now we have a registry of these servers, so people
- 6:15 – 7:40
MCP registries
- AAAlex Albert
can actually, like, upload these to the registry, and then we, like, authorize them or-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... we approve them, and-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah, totally. So the, the, the open source, uh, the, the open source project, um, uh, has a... We've just released a, a central registry of MCP servers. Um, in kind of keeping with the open source ethos, we have both a registry that's hosted at the Model Contact Protocol organization site, and also a standard that allows other organizations to extend the registry, pull that information in. Um, and so we've seen massive growth of, like, MCP- GitHub MCP, like Asana MCP. Like, a, a lot of companies are, are, are building and deploying these endpoints, and so it's becoming easier to pull this in. Uh, from a... In, in the past, you would have to go and if you wanted to interact with GitHub, you'd have to go find some random developer who had hacked together a GitHub connector and then trust their Node.js install on your computer to go in, and now you can just go hit the official GitHub site. Like, I think it's mcp.github.com. You can put that into your Claude Code or claude.ai and then extend Claude with the ability to interact with GitHub.
- AAAlex Albert
Right.
- JWJohn Welsh
Um, so it's really maturing in a way that's really cool.
- AAAlex Albert
That's pretty cool, and I've been using the GitHub MCP for things in Claude Code as well, and it's nice
- 7:40 – 10:40
Favorite MCPs: Context7 & Playwright
- AAAlex Albert
to just have that one URL endpoint-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... that can just plug in. Is there any kind of fun and unique MCPs right now in the registry or outside of the registry that you guys have seen?
- MCMichael Cohen
I think one that, um, I think has been really, really interesting to watch, uh, it's called Context7.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- MCMichael Cohen
Um, so one of the biggest limitations of large language models is that they have a knowledge cutoff, um, that's usually, you know, delayed by a couple of months, um, which means that working with, like, the latest and greatest packages as a software developer, um, is sometimes difficult with LLMs-
- AAAlex Albert
Right
- MCMichael Cohen
... because they will just give you outdated information. Um, and what Context7 does is, um, it takes care of pulling, um, documentation from these websites, um, like Next.js's website or even our own API's website, and keeping those up to date, and all you have to do is configure your, um, MCP connection once, and Claude will have the access to the latest information out there on whatever it is that you're soft- uh, developing against.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm. Okay. Yeah. I think I had heard of that. So we're basically pulling in the latest docs, everything, and I know right now we're also in the mid transition of a lot of folks making their docs completely just raw text-
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm-hmm
- AAAlex Albert
... accessible to LLMs. So I'm assuming that's, like, pulling from that same sort of information, right?
- MCMichael Cohen
Yeah. So this is, like, the llms.text-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, format.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah.
- MCMichael Cohen
Which I've seen a lot of, like, adoption of-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, like, throughout the entire tech industry, which has been very exciting to see.
- AAAlex Albert
That's cool.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah.
- AAAlex Albert
Any from you, John?
- JWJohn Welsh
From, from, from my end, there's, um... I, I found it useful, I, I s- From, from my m- my work as a, as a software developer, I really like, um, Playwright as an MCP server, uh, which allows, uh, Claude to go and interact with browsers as though it was a user clicking around.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- JWJohn Welsh
So if you're, like, working on a website, uh, Claude can read all your CSS and read your HTML, but it can't actually look at your web page. But if you go and install the Playwright MCP server, then you can have Claude go look at your web page and give you advice on how to, how to make it more beautiful or, like, fix alignment issues.
- AAAlex Albert
So it's, like, actually screenshots.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah. It's actually-
- AAAlex Albert
Ah, okay
- JWJohn Welsh
... loading it up in a browser, browsing around using, um, Playwright. It's a Microsoft, uh, uh, project that allows, uh, remote br- browser driving.
- AAAlex Albert
What happens when you put that in a loop with something like Claude Code?
- JWJohn Welsh
Oh, you can just, uh, y- you can get some self-improvement loops. Like, if I tell Claude Code to go and fix an alignment problem in a header, um, it can go make some changes to my HTML, make some changes to my CSS, reload the page if necessary-
- 10:40 – 11:50
Using the Claude API MCP connector
- AAAlex Albert
API, how can I use MCPs with our API and with Claude models?
- MCMichael Cohen
So that's excellent question. The canonical standard way of doing this is to install the MCP SDK, um, set up your own loop, like you mentioned with Claude Code, um, and handle connecting to any MCP server that you need to get connected to. Um, but it's essentially your responsibility as a software developer to put together all the glue work.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm.
- MCMichael Cohen
Um, which is great, and it works. Um, but what we recently released, um, directly into the API as a native feature is the MCP connector feature-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm
- MCMichael Cohen
... which allows you to just specify where your remote MCPs live, like mcp.github.com, and, um, provide us with whatever authorization information, and we can take care of that, um, calling loop, um, of executing the tools and getting the results fed back to the model for you. So all you really have to do is send a single API call that says, like, "Give me my latest pull requests"-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- MCMichael Cohen
... and it will, it will go ahead and take care of that for you.
- AAAlex Albert
That's awesome. Yeah, I've been hearing from a lot of developers that they've just been able to delete tons of code-
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm-hmm
- AAAlex Albert
... because they just have that, so they don't have to handle all that back and forth themselves now.
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm.
- AAAlex Albert
Just, like, pass in the URL and to the endpoint and then you're kind of good to go.
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm-hmm.
- 11:50 – 14:20
Prompt engineering with MCP
- AAAlex Albert
Um, what are some other tips for developers using MCP?
- JWJohn Welsh
I think that, um, the main one that I try to give developers when I talk is that MCP servers and tools are really, at its core, prompts.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- JWJohn Welsh
And so we've kind of learned that if you're writing AI-powered applications, it's really important to be careful and precise about the language that you use when you're prompting the model. This extends to-Everything about defining your MCP server, like defining your tool names, uh, appropriately, giving them descriptions. Maybe your description has a few short examples in the description of how to use it, giving, like, appropriate parameter names. Um, this is all stuff that's gonna affect your m-model's behavior when it interacts with the MCP server. An example that I had was I was making an image generation server, and I had a tool called Generate Image, and then it had a, a field called Description, and that's it. And then, like, you tell Claude, like, "Hey, generate me an image of a cute puppy," and it'll go, go along, call the tool, be like, "Description: a cute puppy." Great.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- JWJohn Welsh
Um, if you go and change that and you say, like, uh, "This tool calls the XXX diffusion model version Y and is... should be prompted in this style, uh, for best results, like, use this kind of descriptive language," do, do all of this, Claude has information about, like, how to interact with these systems, and it just needs to be told, uh, "Oh, great, I know that I'm talking to a diffusion model now. I'm gonna change my language, what I'm gonna use in this prompt," and it's gonna go and instead of s- asking for a cute puppy, it's gonna give you a much more detailed, uh, diffusion model prompt that'll give you much better results. You get much better results from your MCP server just by changing a few words in your description or your prompt name, just the same as you get better results, uh, writing pull requests or doing any sort of knowledge work with Claude that you, you would by, uh, by tweaking those.
- AAAlex Albert
I mean, I f- myself forget this all the time, that when you're dealing with a tool or some sort of description in isolation as you're, like, working on a new feature for some, you know, AI app, it all gets pulled back into the same prompt, right? And it's all just, like, one text string at the end of the day that's getting fed into the model in each request. And yeah, that's good advice that like, hey, that's part of the prompt too. Like, the description that you're writing in some JSON somewhere in your code is still gonna be pulled into that same prompt that gets sent to Claude on its own, quote, request.
- 14:20 – 18:20
Best practices for managing context and tools with MCP
- AAAlex Albert
Let's talk a little bit about context management as well and, like, dealing with lots of tools and lots of results.
- JWJohn Welsh
Mm.
- AAAlex Albert
I mean, this is a huge problem for LLMs right now in terms of polluting the context. Curious if you have any thoughts there on how developers should think about that with MCP.
- MCMichael Cohen
Yeah. So I think a big anti-pattern that we've seen a lot of developers make is just stuffing their MCP servers or their API requests with MCP servers, with just tons of tools or tons of MCP servers-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm
- MCMichael Cohen
... which not only gets expensive because you're just generating tokens for every single one that you're adding, but, um, also has a tendency of confusing the model. An example is, um, if you connect both your Linear and your Asana task management MCP servers-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, in the same request, both of those might have a, uh, Get Project Status, uh, MCP tool, um, and the model will not have an implicit information about which one of them to use in which context. But beyond that, you're just, um, yeah, you're, you're essentially confusing the model by giving it potentially conflicting information. So just, um, being very, very careful and deterministic about, like, which tools you add, making sure that the ergonomics around them also make sense, and that using those tools feels natural to you if you were getting to use them yourself. Um, but beyond that, making sure that you, um, yeah, just don't, don't include any information that might not necessarily help with the current turn of user prompts. So sometimes older parts of the conversation, um, that might involve very introductory information like, you know, "What's the weather today?" um, might not be as relevant much, much later on in the conversation when you are moving on to the latest news or some other information that you need from the model.
- AAAlex Albert
Hmm. I often get asked, how many tools can I pass into Claude, or how many MCP servers can I hook up at one time? And it seems like it's not so much a number question. Rather, it's like a how distinct are the tools from each other and how well defined and scoped out.
- MCMichael Cohen
Mm.
- AAAlex Albert
Is that correct, or is there also kind of like a absolute number of MCPs limitation?
- JWJohn Welsh
I think you'll, you'll, you'll also end up with an absolute number, like each, if your context window is, is X tokens, each server is gonna pull in a number of function definitions. Each of those is gonna eat it up, so you're gonna, um, just, just start. As you give LLMs more information, it, it makes it harder for them to make good decisions. And so even though it will probably work if you hook up to a bunch of, a bunch of servers, um, it'll probably work better if you can give Claude a subset that's relevant to the task that it's looking at.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- JWJohn Welsh
One other point coming out here from what Michael was saying is if you're designing an MCP server, uh, generally if you can have one or two tools in your server, uh, versus having, uh, 15 or 20 tools, it'll help the model a lot. And so it's sometimes M-MCP, like, interface development is, is a bit different than API development, where we're feeding these into LLMs, and if you give a tool a description that maybe takes some natural language or has, like, as part of, like, filling out the parameters, the model's gonna make some decisions and, and generates some text you can maybe get away with instead of an API where you'd be like, get projects, get posts, get users. You might just have a, like, get info tool where, where the... 'cause your calling LLM will be able to, like, look at your description and fill out whatever information it needs, and that way you can provide, like, a much smaller set of tools. You will both play nicer with other MCP servers, and you'll ensure that your server gets called, um, more efficiently and appropriately.
- AAAlex Albert
Right. So it's not always a one-to-one translation. Like, there's different levels of abstraction-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah, definitely
- AAAlex Albert
... that you can apply, and perhaps the API spec is not the best defined thing for the model to take in either. Yeah. Um, so you guys live and breathe MCP all day, every day, basically. Uh, how are you guys using it, whether it's at work or, uh,
- 18:20 – 20:00
How John and Michael use MCP servers for project management, home automation, and more
- AAAlex Albert
whether it's in-At home or a side project or anything else? I, I know the example with Playwright, but is there other ways that you guys are experimenting with MCP on the side?
- MCMichael Cohen
One of the biggest use cases that I've found personally is, um, Anthropic is often an information highway. There's just so much information all over the place between our Slack and our docs and our code base. Um, and getting the latest status on how the project that I'm currently on is going is not often very, very easy to-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm
- MCMichael Cohen
... understand from just a single source. Um, so what I've gotten in the habit of doing is, um, I will either on claude.ai or on Claude Code, set up my MCP servers to connect to all these various locations. Um, and I'll just ask it, um, "Hey, here's a couple of examples of past project updates that I've written myself. Can you go find information from the last week and generate a status update, uh, using the same exact format?" And I would say that, like, the, the success rate on that is, is much, much higher than I originally thought.
- AAAlex Albert
Am I reading your status updates then in your Slack, and those are all Claude generated? [laughs]
- MCMichael Cohen
I, yeah, I'm never-
- AAAlex Albert
Yes. [laughs]
- MCMichael Cohen
I'm never actually writing anything anymore.
- AAAlex Albert
I've just been reading Claude the whole time. Okay, good to know. How about you, John?
- JWJohn Welsh
I, I've found, uh, a couple of angles. Uh, from hacking around my home, home hardware, I, I have some MCP servers running on my, my home network that can control things around my house, and so I can go and in a conversation with Claude be like, "Hey, like, did, uh, did I leave my door unlocked this morning?" And Claude can say, "Yeah, your door is currently unlocked. Would you like me to lock it for you?"
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah.
- JWJohn Welsh
And come back and be like, "Yeah, that'd be great." Uh, that sort of thing's really useful, um, kind of fun to play with. It, it's kind of feels like a sneak peek into
- 20:00 – 22:50
Understanding the “emergent” behaviors when Claude and MCP servers work together
- JWJohn Welsh
what the future world might look like. The, it's, there's kind of a magical feeling with MCP servers, uh, because you get these sort of emergent properties from adding them that you might not expect. Like, the, the, an example of, of this is, uh, when we very first time we started playing with MCP servers, I built a knowledge grap-graph server with some of my colleagues here at Anthropic. And-
- AAAlex Albert
A knowledge graph in this case is?
- JWJohn Welsh
A knowledge graph, meaning, uh, we wanted to give Claude the ability to take memories and form, like, connections between memories.
- AAAlex Albert
I see.
- JWJohn Welsh
And so it's an MCP server that had two tools. It's had a create memory tool and a connect memory to other memory tool, and the simplest possible interface, and we hooked this up to Claude, and Claude suddenly you'd have conversations with Claude, and it would enter investigative journalist mode, where I'd, I'd say like, "I play piano," and Claude would be like, "That's amazing. What do you like to play?" And it's, I'm like, "I like to play Rachmaninoff." And it's like, "That's- is there any- anything that's, that's your favorite there?" And, and I'd look at the knowledge graph, and Claude is going and scribbling down and be like, "User has sophisticated classical music tastes-"
- AAAlex Albert
[laughs]
- JWJohn Welsh
"... and is like trying to find like, like, uh, is, is skilled in instruments." And, and that's just from like s- and from a such a small change that you provided. And one of the really cool things with having MCP as a protocol is if you hook in your Gmail server with your home automation server, then, um, maybe you can go and Claude can figure out some way to solve a problem that you ask it-
- AAAlex Albert
Right
- JWJohn Welsh
... by connecting those two together you might never have thought of.
- AAAlex Albert
Right.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah. So there's kind of that fuzzy in between when these things all get hooked together where-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... pair that with Claude's kind of general intelligence and-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... interesting things can happen.
- JWJohn Welsh
And it's like one of the core differences between MCP and, um, like traditional structured APIs where because everything is so fuzzy and because the LLMs are smart enough to just kind of smush it together, like you care a lot less about contracts. Like, there's this interesting property where if I have an MCP server for interacting with Gmail, and then I go and I do some evals, and I find like a better set of tools and descriptions to-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- JWJohn Welsh
... interact with Gmail, and it changes it from 15 tools with this set of descriptions to like two tools with the other one, um, I don't have to go and roll out a new version of my API for that. Like, if you're changing your API in a s- massive way like that-
- AAAlex Albert
You have to deal with breaking changes
- JWJohn Welsh
... breaking changes-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- JWJohn Welsh
... talking to users-
- AAAlex Albert
Right
- JWJohn Welsh
... doing all of that. MCP, I can just roll that out, and because the intent of the MCP is to allow Claude to interact with Gmail, it's not like I'm gonna provide a, a read emails tool and a write email tool.
- AAAlex Albert
Right.
- JWJohn Welsh
Um, so it's, it's really cool.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah, it's about more like the higher, higher level
- 22:50 – 25:58
The future of MCP: growth of the protocol and ecosystem
- AAAlex Albert
intent and like actions-
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah
- AAAlex Albert
... rather than like the sp- specific technical detail of how we get there.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah, that's really cool. Um, so where is this all headed? Where is MCP gonna be in, you know, six months, 12 months, a year plus?
- MCMichael Cohen
That's an interesting question because I've always viewed, you know, like John said, MCP is a protocol. Um, so it's very interesting to see popularity for a protocol considering that, um, it, you know, if MCP is successful and, um, us and everybody that integrates with it did their job right, um, we should never know that MCP is, is happening under the hood. Um, it should just be you using whatever program or app that you're using, um, and MCP is happening under the hood, just making everything glued together-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm
- MCMichael Cohen
... and LLMs kind of configure everything. So you're just giving it the arms and the legs that it needs. But yeah, it's, it's, it's always been interesting to me to see the, uh, the hype around MCP.
- AAAlex Albert
Right. Right. Do you think that's gonna continue? Is there like a plateau here? What does that actually look like in terms of protocol? Is there any sort of precedent we can look at to like judge MCP against?
- MCMichael Cohen
I think it's hard applying a precedent to anything in the world-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- MCMichael Cohen
... of, of AI that we're in.
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah. Right. True.
- MCMichael Cohen
Um, but, uh, I, I definitely see, um, a lot of the stuff that John and, and his colleagues over on the MCP team have been doing, um, is very exciting, and it's very, it, to me, it's been amazing seeing, um, companies big and small-
- AAAlex Albert
Mm-hmm
- MCMichael Cohen
... um, come to the table and come talk about how we can proliferate it-
- AAAlex Albert
Yeah
- MCMichael Cohen
... and make it a, this ubiquitous thing that is just everywhere, um, the same way that, I don't know, our internet is.
- JWJohn Welsh
One, one thing that's, that's really exciting for me going forward, I think we're at a point now where a lot of people have realized the value of MCP, and they've started writing these servers. But in terms of the MCP's servers as prompts analogy, we're in like very early days.
- AAAlex Albert
Mm.
- JWJohn Welsh
And so I'm really excited for people, now that they've started building out these servers, to start, like evaluating how they, how they work and making them better. And I'm excited for it to start to become a metric by which you might evaluate like a vendor for your, for your work. Like if I'm, if I'm hiring a log, if I'm paying someone to do log analytics, for example, it would be really cool, it's really valuable to me if I could just hook in your log analytics MCP server into my Claude and say, "Hey, my site is down. What's going on?" And if they've gone and designed and developed a, a really wonderful MCP server that gives Claude the tools it needs to like interact with their services and find those answers, then that's like a huge s- selling point for me as an engineer because then I can, I can rely on this functionality. I don't have to build it. And I'm excited for this to start becoming more mature and have it be less of it's exciting that we've shipped an MCP server and starting to see people compete on, we have the best MCP server. This, this is gonna make your life so much easier-
- AAAlex Albert
Right
- JWJohn Welsh
... like you should use us-
- AAAlex Albert
Right
- JWJohn Welsh
... because we interact with Claude in this way.
- AAAlex Albert
Well, I'm excited for that future as well. Um, thank you guys for coming on. This has been great.
- JWJohn Welsh
Yeah. Thank you so much. [outro music]
Episode duration: 25:58
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