Sorry for the the click bait-y title. Though it is a bit of hyperbole, I do believe that there will be a fundamental paradigm shift in the near future with the proliferation of MCP servers and clients.
What is MCP?
MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a new protocol established to link together tools along with using LLMs (large language models).
How it works?
The first thing you need to do is create an MCP server. This is a long running service that is the entry point of your clients. Then you just create a set of tools with an id, description, and inputSchema. And that's about it. You will have your app (clients) that call into the MCP server with a prompt. The MCP server will use an LLM to try and decide which tools to call into to get the proper response. The responses can be sent via server sent events back to the client.
How this changes things?
As a frontend engineer, we have had to very cognizant of where to place elements on the screen. Will it be discoverable? Will it catch the user's eye? Does it tell the user what the call to action is? With this new UI paradigm, a user simply tells the application what it is s/he wants to see. Now everything is discoverable. If you are a company with a lot of data and struggle with how to display it on the screen, this could be a way to allow the user to discover it all.
There will still need to be some decisions and patterns on the exact interface. Will there be a set of related questions after the initial? Do you show a visual representation of the data requested? While the patterns are still being ironed out, it is clear that a disruption is here for the future.
Top comments (0)