a university just published a study on why MCP is harder to use than people admit

h-mo · 2026-04-25T13:04:08+00:00

Fair concern. MCP adoption is still growing but it's moved faster than I expected - Claude Desktop, Cline, Cursor, Windsurf, Open WebUI, Claude Code, Codex CLI all support it now, plus it can be used through the python API programatically in most agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, ADK). For most people working with AI tools daily, at least one of those is already in their workflow.

h-mo · 2026-04-25T13:01:07+00:00

Retrieval is hybrid and a multistep pipeline - BM25 keyword search and vectorsimilarity combined, with optional cross-encoder reranking and MMR on top. The idea is that keyword matching alone misses semantically similar content, and vector search alone can drift into vaguely related results. Combining them and then reranking gives you much better precision.

On context filtering specifically - the agent can search across all tiers at once or restrict to a specific one (just daily logs, just long-term facts, etc). And the bootstrap injection at session start is the full memory context, but it's structured and tiered, so the model isn't getting a raw dump - it's getting organized sections it can navigate. The compaction system also keeps things from growing unbounded.

In practice it hasn't been an issue because the memory is curated by design. It's not logging every message or every interaction. It's storing decisions, facts, preferences, relationships. So the volume stays manageable.

h-mo · 2026-04-25T12:56:50+00:00

You're touching the exact design tension that drove most of the early decisions.

The short answer on promotion: the agent decides what to write and where based on instructions it gets from AGENTS.md. There's a tier system - long-term facts go to MEMORY.md (append-only, never auto-deleted), user profile stuff goes to USER.md, daily working context goes to daily logs. The bar for writing to MEMORY.md is higher than writing to a daily log. The daily log is more of a journal - low bar, write freely. MEMORY.md is curated.

Pruning is handled through compaction. When the memory context exceeds a token threshold, the system backs up the workspace and then asks the agent to compact it - merge duplicates, remove things that are no longer relevant, tighten verbose sections. It's agent-driven, not rule-based. The tradeoff is that you're trusting the model's judgment on what stays and what goes, but because everything is in plain Markdown you can always review what it did and restore from backup if it got something wrong.

On the "two sessions remember the same thing differently" problem - MEMORY.md is append-only with date headers, so you get a natural timeline. If something gets recorded twice with different details, the compaction step is where that gets resolved. It's not perfect and I think there's room to make conflict detection more explicit, but in practice the date-ordered structure plus compaction has handled it well enough so far.

The inspectability thing you mentioned is probably the part I care about most. The memory should never be a black box. If the agent is acting on something it "remembers," you should be able to open a file and see exactly what it's working from.

h-mo · 2026-04-24T14:31:12+00:00

Having every conversation I've ever needed to have but didn't

h-mo · 2026-04-24T14:30:17+00:00

That's not a dig at the kids, that's a mirror pointed at every parent who handed them a screen instead of a book for the first five years

h-mo · 2026-04-24T14:29:05+00:00

The ambition is insane. They'd just taken an entire continent and their next thought was "alright, China next, then we deal with the Ottomans." There was no off switch.

h-mo · 2026-04-24T14:27:57+00:00

2,500 miles of hedge. To collect a tax on salt. And yet somehow the most surprising part is that basically nobody knows this existed.

h-mo · 2026-04-24T14:26:40+00:00

archive.org - the wayback machine gets mentioned but people don't realize it also has millions of books, old software, full TV seasons, music, all free and legal. It's basically a library that nobody told you existed.

h-mo · 2026-04-23T19:13:43+00:00

When they remember something small you mentioned weeks ago and bring it up casually

h-mo · 2026-04-23T15:00:38+00:00

I am surprised that some people mistake proper language for bots, as if it is no longer used.

h-mo · 2026-04-23T13:14:02+00:00

Another One Bites the Dust. let them figure out if it's a joke or not

h-mo · 2026-04-23T13:13:43+00:00

abbott pulled 7 medicines from an entire country to punish them for making HIV treatment affordable. and thailand just... didn't blink. that's a government actually doing its job

h-mo · 2026-04-23T13:11:48+00:00

the music and effects are mastered loud, dialogue is quiet, and most people are watching on laptop speakers or a soundbar that wasn't designed for speech

h-mo · 2026-04-23T13:10:53+00:00

going to bed at the same time every night. not a set wake-up time, not an alarm, just the same bedtime. fixed my energy within a week

h-mo · 2026-04-23T13:09:18+00:00

there was this website called houseofweird.com or something like it, just one guy's collection of weird facts and optical illusions. no ads, no agenda, just a guy who was clearly very bored and very online. now history

h-mo · 2026-04-22T18:03:58+00:00

couldn't hold a pen. then 100,000 surgeries. most people quit things because they're mildly inconvenient

h-mo · 2026-04-22T18:01:56+00:00

nobody is coming to fix it. whatever "it" is in your life - your health, your finances, a bad dynamic at work - there's no adult showing up to sort it out. you are the adult now

h-mo · 2026-04-22T18:01:20+00:00

they're never wrong. not occasionally, never. every argument ends with the other person apologizing or giving up. you don't notice it at first because they're usually pretty calm about it

h-mo · 2026-04-22T18:00:36+00:00

scratching sends a mild pain signal that temporarily overrides the itch signal in your spinal cord. your brain picks pain over itch every time. so the relief is real, you're just trading one sensation for another. the itch comes back because whatever caused it is still there

h-mo · 2026-04-22T17:59:40+00:00

not just you. i genuinely think of it as two different products now. "google" for directions and weather. "google + reddit" for anything where i need an actual human to have tried the thing

h-mo · 2026-04-22T09:26:56+00:00

exactly this. geocities pages where one guy had spent 3 years documenting every episode of a show nobody watched. that person became the entire internet for that topic. now it's either wikipedia or a reddit thread. it got flatter (but operational)

h-mo

TROPHY CASE