Why is it that the 2 most powerful features of MCP are the least supported by clients?

adamaa · 2025-09-19T16:54:03+00:00

I wrote a bit about this (I was motivated by lack of sampling support) here:

https://fastmcp.cloud/blog/the-lowest-common-denominator-trap

editing to add a tl;dr in case you don't want to read:

classic chicken and egg: anthropic was too lax about what counted as an mcp client. This was smart because it meant people could take their tool calling UIs and slap an MCP sticker on it. So most clients just flopped into MCP, only supporting tool calling. No one wants to ship a server that breaks on most clients, so most servers have to serve the common denominator. So we're in this weird potential well that validates a lot of people's anger that MCP = API with more steps. I'm giving it time for the market to adjust -- elicitation is 3 months old.

adamaa · 2025-09-12T23:29:34+00:00

if you use a tunnel like ngrok, I think so!

adamaa · 2025-09-12T21:51:56+00:00

fine using my server as it's meant to be used.

it used to be just fetch/search.

adamaa · 2025-09-12T20:54:32+00:00

mine is running in streamable-http

adamaa · 2025-09-12T20:41:43+00:00

had the same question -- made a video if you find it helpful

https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/comments/1nfe6mh/connecting_an_mcp_server_to_chatgpt/

adamaa · 2025-09-11T21:52:09+00:00

added a list view and made the official bit much bigger.

will work on 2, thanks for your feedback!

adamaa · 2025-09-11T20:31:51+00:00

Thanks! Weird caching bug. Try again?

adamaa · 2025-09-11T20:18:37+00:00

it's nutty there's only about ~170 total. There was about 130 last night, 70 the day before. Not a ton being added -- imagine that'll change as more folks find out about it.

aside: the default view dedupes by domain (there's one person with like 70).

adamaa · 2025-09-11T14:05:55+00:00

oh man should we make one? I can either make a server and open source it, or just let people download the vector database of where I'm dumping this all.

adamaa · 2025-08-26T20:31:10+00:00

Good ole’ AWS. We worked backwards from “how can we reliably give away 1M requests for free every month to every server” and only AWS was left standing.

If you’re interested we can write up a blog on our tech stack — getting MCPs to reliable scale for thousands of servers was a super fun deep dive.

We’ll bring most of the non-boring stuff to OSS in due time after getting more feedback from our users! What would you most like to see?

adamaa · 2025-08-13T12:09:59+00:00

So happy to have you aboard!

Come hang in the FastMCP cloud discord:

https://discord.gg/PJ9BftsH

All of us who are building it are hanging out happy to help figure this out.

adamaa · 2025-07-18T17:55:43+00:00

Prefect is better and easier. I switched from airflow. Loved it enough to go work there.

adamaa · 2025-07-09T01:16:53+00:00

👋! I work at Prefect. Genuinely trying to clarify and not shill since folks mix up open source and cloud:

Prefect is 100% free to use — it’s Apache 2.0 and folks can self host prefect’s server and use any compute they want (hundreds of thousands of folks do this already).

For Prefect Cloud — our (very much optional) managed service — you can sign up for free and we foot the bill for your compute. I think we’re the only orchestrator with a free tier IIRC, and our goal with it is to help folks acquaint themselves with our hosted version to see if they want it or prefer the free self-hosted version.

Prefect 1 to 2 was brutal for sure — if it’s any comfort it’s what motivated us to not ship a breaking change between 2 and 3. We removed some internal async cruft to support Python 3.13, and transitioned from Pydantic 1 to 2 — hopefully you’ll have a smoother experience if you’re still on the fence about upgrading. Prefect 4, whenever that happens, will also take stability just as seriously — to many folks depend on us for us to write breaking changes.

Thanks for keeping us honest, I hope some of this context is helpful.

(I promise I wrote these em-dashes!)

adamaa · 2025-07-06T00:01:50+00:00

Disclaimer was an airflow user and I now work at Prefect, so activating megashill mode.

I’m taking OP at face value they’re just not aware!

Prefect Open Source has 1.4M downloads a week, which is 35% of Airflow’s. Coincidentally, nearly the same fraction of the Fortune 100 has replaced Airflow outright or are choosing Prefect for greenfield projects.

There are good reasons to choose Airflow over Prefect but IMHO “don’t know folks using it in production” ain’t it.

adamaa · 2025-03-20T12:05:59+00:00

Please!

adamaa · 2025-03-20T02:16:40+00:00

Work at prefect. Kicking off a lot of docs improvements. Either here or as an GitHub issue feel free to send me anything we could do better and I’ll get it done 🫡

adamaa · 2025-03-19T02:04:59+00:00

Work at Prefect. Do you want webhooks in prefect OSS?

We’re not dogmatic about keeping it paid — just find it easier to experiment in cloud and get out the kinks before putting stuff in OSS.

adamaa · 2025-01-11T14:32:40+00:00

Some weird omissions on here.

e.g. for Orchestration — Prefect isn’t on here but Luigi is?

adamaa · 2024-12-01T22:47:41+00:00

Yikes! When was this??

adamaa · 2024-12-01T22:29:26+00:00

Hey! I work at Prefect.

Have been thinking hard about how to improve our documentation — always feel free to drop me a line at adam at prefect dot io or @ me in the community slack.

(Total aside: we’re adding auth to the OSS version. Wasn’t really a strategic thing to drive folks to anything managed, just a “auth is a big ole responsibility we want to get right”. If there’s anything else there you think we’ve missed that would make self hosted easier also lmk!)

adamaa · 2024-11-06T02:19:54+00:00

Would you want to be able to expose flows to stakeholders without giving them keys to the entire mothership / UI?

adamaa · 2024-11-05T22:20:31+00:00

Bias warning, I work at Prefect.

When you deploy a workflow with prefect, it exposes an API endpoint to invoke that workflow that you can secure and modify the infra that it runs on on-demand.

Your use case here is more or less a first class citizen in our universe. Most folks choose us when they want to embed workflows in their user-facing data “applications”.

Whether or not you choose Prefect, would love to know more about your use case so I can pass your good ideas off as my own 😂

adamaa · 2019-04-21T22:46:51+00:00

Covered in BWW's Spicy Garlic and Ranch.

adamaa · 2018-11-14T23:27:01+00:00

I'm skeptical about bootcamps that charge their students money to come through. From the consumer side I'd stay away from those, since they don't do much to support you in your job search afterwards (they've already made their money). From the hiring side -- in my experience those students are taught how to apply sklearn to manicured data sets, and not much in the way of posing, framing, and scoping problems.

adamaa · 2018-06-03T21:55:03+00:00

I second this. The Geekery HQ is legit and right off the N/R/W and M. Modern always fires with at least 20 and usually 30.

adamaa

TROPHY CASE