Anthropic were the progenitors of the Model Context Protocol. Claude Code does not fully implement the client end of the protocol. A protocol; a literal pre-defined spec that an agent should be able to one-shot. Neither does Codex. Codex does not implement MCP Prompts.
(I want Codex to implement MCP Prompts because then we have one central way to ship skills from a server).
The fact that neither platform can implement a protocol given what is functionally infinite frontier model tokens really says a lot. I do not care what kind of random project some influencer can ship with a swarm of 1000 agents. If you cannot make the basics work, it is a farce.
It still boggles my mind that Anthropic would invent the MCP protocol but not fully implement it.
Especially when fully implementing it (prompts, resources, tools) is easily done in harnesses that don’t ship with MCP but allow good extension / modification like Pi.
Claude not being able to see its own usage or self invoke slash commands is also very frustrating.
Given functionally unlimited access to tokens with frontier models, there is really no "force you to keep busy"; it should just bake overnight. We're talking about a rather simple and well-defined specification; not something novel and complex.
My point is that there is a chance that Anthropic launched MCP:
1. not fully believing in it
2. but knowing the hype around MCP would force other AI labs to implement it (standard enterprise checkbox behavior)
3. thus wasting some of their competitors' development cycles
* * *
And let's be real here, the entire discussion happens in the context of a basic bug in a coding agent, do we really believe that these labs have hit AGI in coding?
Random example:
Go to claude.ai or gemini.google.com (I imagine OpenAI is in a similar situation).
Type a question, press enter. Wait 2 seconds, then turn on airplane mode.
Not only does the connection cut off, but even if you reconnect 20 minutes later, you still won't get the answer.
Their website works in purely sync mode!!!
We knew better than this when HTML was invented, 30 years ago.
Do their products give you the impression than "baking features with unlimited tokens overnight" leads to decent products?
(I want Codex to implement MCP Prompts because then we have one central way to ship skills from a server).
The fact that neither platform can implement a protocol given what is functionally infinite frontier model tokens really says a lot. I do not care what kind of random project some influencer can ship with a swarm of 1000 agents. If you cannot make the basics work, it is a farce.