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In my mind the only thing novel about MCP is requiring the schema is provided as part of the protocol. Like, sure it's convenient that the shape of the requests/response wrappers are all the same, that certainly helps with management using libraries that can wrap dynamic types in static types, but everyone was already doing that with APIs already we just didn't agree on what that envelope's shape should be. BUT, with the requirement that schema be provided with the protocol, and the carrot of AI models seamlessly consuming it, that was enough of an impetus.


> the only thing novel about MCP is requiring the schema is provided as part of the protocol

You mean, like OpenAPI, gRPC, SOAP, and CORBA?


Where is the mandatory human readable prose description of the purpose of the tool in any of those specs. It isn't. Also the simplicity of JSON interface descriptions is key.


You can’t connect to a gRPC endpoint and ask to download the client protobuf, but yes.


It's not enabled by default, but you can --- gRPC Reflection:

* https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/documentation/...

* https://grpc.io/docs/guides/reflection/

You can then use generic tools like grpc_cli or grpcurl to list available services and methods, and call them.




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