by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-09 11:29:24+00:00
MCP solves the wrong problem. The mechanics of calling tools, commands, apis, etc. isn't all that hard given some documentation. That's why agentic coding tools work so well.

For security, some sandboxing can address enough concerns that many developers feel comfortable enough using these tools. Also, you have things like version control and CI/CD mechanisms where you can do reviews and manually approve things. Worst case you just don't merge a PR. Or you revert one.

For business usage, the tools are more complicated, state full, dangerous, and mistakes can be costly. Employees are given a lot of powerful tools and are expected to know what to do and not do. E.g. a company credit card can be abused but employees know that would get them in jail and fired. So they moderate what they buy. Likewise they know not to send company secrets by email.

AI tools with the same privileges as employees would be problematic. It's way too easy to trick them into exfiltrating information, doing a lot of damage with expensive resources, etc. This cannot be fixed by a simple permission model. There needs to be something that can figure out what is appropriate to do and not under some defined policy and audit agent behavior. Asking the user for permission every time something needs to happen is not a scalable solution. This needs to be automated. Also, users aren't particularly good at this if it isn't simple. It's way too easy for them to make mistakes answering questions about permissions.

I think that's where the attention will go for a lot of the AI investments. AIs are so useful for coding now that it becomes tempting to see if we can replicate the success of having agents do complex things in different contexts. If the cost savings are significant, it's worth taking some risks even. Just like with coding tools. I run codex with --yolo. In a vm. But still, it could do some damage. But it does some useful stuff for me and the bad stuff is so far theoretical.

I run a small startup, a short cut to success here is taking a development perspective to using business tools. For example instead of using google docs or ms word, use text based file formats like markdown, latex, or whatever and then pandoc to convert them. I've been updating our website this way. It's a static hugo website. I can do all sorts of complicated structure and content updates with codex. That limits my input to providing text and direction. If I was still using wordpress, I'd be stuck and doing all this manually. Which is a great argument to ditch that in a hurry.

I don't necessarily like it writing text though it can be good to have a first shot at a new page. But it's great at putting text in the right place, doing consistency checks, fixing broken layout, restructuring pages, etc. I just asked it to add a partner logo and source the appropriate svg. In the past I would have done that manually. Download some svg. Figure out where to put it. And then fiddle with some files to get it working. Not a huge task but something I no longer have to do manually. Website maintenance has lots of micro tasks like this. I get to focus on the big picture. Having a static site generator and codex fast forwards me a few years in terms of using AI to do complex website updates. Forget about doing any of this with the mainstream web based content management systems any time soon.