This is the biggest elephant in the room I have seen in my decade+ career. At the same time, look how bad Apple is in software compared to its hardware... It's not an AI only problem, it's almost like software in general gets a free pass on being very unsafe or low quality because no one wants to face the same "profit reducing red tape" that civil engineers or similar face.
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?
> same "profit reducing red tape" that civil engineers or similar face.
I don't think we should ever head toward licensing/a credential body for software development, but I do think now is a good time to have discussions around liability for defective products.
A good start would be to stop allowing companies to disclaim all warranties of fitness for a particular purpose in their EULAs. The joke of Microsoft Copilot applies here where they have a big disclaimer that "Copilot is for entertainment purposes only" while advertising says otherwise. Not even the chrome EULA will agree that its fit for purpose as a web browser. The clause is a get out of jail free card that shifts all liability and risk to the end user.
> I don't think we should ever head toward licensing/a credential body for software development, but I do think now is a good time to have discussions around liability for defective products.
Liability is how a credential body would organically grow. It already exists in the security, compliance, and enterprise parts of the software world.
That can be okay. The problems we're worried about come when it's government mandated.
The EU Cyber Resilience Act puts heavy liability on vendors for software vulnerabilities that get exploited, including in open-source components they incorporate. OSS devs are shielded - liability is on the companies who incorporate OSS into commercial stuff.
In practice, what’s the difference between a government mandated license and a government that quickly rules in favor of parties who are damaged by companies that don’t use licensed software engineers?
E.g. “Your software caused serious damages to our company / livelihood, and you best hope that it turns up in discovery that you used properly licensed software engineers who were following licensing best practices, otherwise this will be a slam dunk case.”
Genuinely an interesting question to me. Seems like the latter is a better option, generally, but it does lock restorative justice behind a paywall - you have to be able to afford a lawyer.
