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Launch HN: Manufact (YC S25) – MCP Cloud (manufact.com)
elliotgarreffa 3 minutes ago [-]
Love it guys! Also working deep in the MCP space we’ve used manufact right since the start. Great product, team and new release! Congrats
msencenb 39 minutes ago [-]
I am really impressed with your demo video, particularly the analytics, logs, and test suite features.

I'm a target customer where I have a few curious customers, but I'm not fully ready to roll it out yet across the customer base. One thing that's stopping me, what does credits mean on your pricing page? And what is the pay as you go price after you hit your limit? I would need to be able to budget this before I deploy.

The second piece - we already have a CLI, which is great for terminal based agents and what we will continue to recommend. What we really want, and I think is what you are offering, is basically an easier way to deploy a 'remote connector' to use Claude lingo so that normal users with the claude/chatgpt app can just use our MCP. Can you point me to guidelines or the right place in your open source templates to understand how I would best handle auth (or the tradeoffs in each) during the initial build phase of the MCP server?

abewheeler 7 minutes ago [-]
Looks great! Congratulations on the launch, guys!
rgbrgb 53 minutes ago [-]
This is cool. I was skeptical of MCP's until I made one recently. They're essentially the exact same as 1) giving your agent a CLI tool or REST API and 2) pointing it there in an AGENT.md/CLAUDE.md. Agents are great at using built-for-human CLI tools and IMO they don't need anything purpose-built for agents. The key difference, which ends up being a usability win for non-technical users, is that the MCP bundles 1 and 2 - harnesses inject the MCP tool descriptions on every session after install. Of course, that's also why you need to be careful about context bloat when using/building them
nijave 55 seconds ago [-]
Yeah MCPs are easier to distribute.

In my experience, they also work better with dumber models than CLIs (which saves money)

pzullo 11 minutes ago [-]
+1 !! Thanks for putting it so clearly, also CLIs and REST have their space in some applications, I think MCP is a way to organize them and distribute them better
pacman1337 50 minutes ago [-]
stopped using mcp and mostly using skills now. can't understand what this product does or how it could help me.
connerBown 54 minutes ago [-]
MCP is something people think of as a "panacea" to all AI issues. I think people are beginning to realize it is just one, albeit important, part of a successful AI architecture.
stingraycharles 49 minutes ago [-]
First of all, people have been saying this for a long time. It’s nothing new, at least half a year, maybe closer to a year.

Secondly, it’s not even that important, it’s the tool calling itself that’s important. MCP servers are just a convenient way to interact with remote services when a command line utility for the same would be inconvenient.

maxalbarello 42 minutes ago [-]
congrats guys! how does the automated testing using ChatGPT/Claude clients work?
ayushrodrigues 50 minutes ago [-]
we have so many problems with MCP related to auth, scopes etc... how do you guys help solve that?
harijoe 24 minutes ago [-]
You may want to have a look at Skybridge, a TypeScript framework designed to build MCP servers and MCP Apps, with a recent emphasis on making authentication easy.
dotancohen 17 minutes ago [-]
TypeScript, for all its benefits, still feels like a toy or project language. I'd love to see a Rust, C++, or even a Go library for such purpose.

I'd love for people with experience to break me of this negativity towards TypeScript. Anybody?

erdos_2 36 minutes ago [-]
Can you get into the specifics of the problems you currently experience with MCP? I'd love to learn more.
sebastiancrossa 12 minutes ago [-]
we've been using manufact for months now. couldn't build mcps another way.
oliviajuwono 1 hours ago [-]
Huge congrats to the team on the official launch of Manufact!
sampton 1 hours ago [-]
MCP is a deadend. CLI use is the future.
dinkleberg 1 hours ago [-]
Not for every situation. CLI is great for coding agents (and I'd agree, far better in most cases than MCP). But it requires some execution runtime somewhere to actually run. So for app use cases where you don't want to build out your own tools for every integration, MCP can be a solid option.
sudb 1 hours ago [-]
Also, in my opinion, it's much easier to build a good MCP interface than it is to build a good CLI interface - and afaik there's support for MCP tools to return things like images from an MCP tool call directly to the calling LLM that is a bit tricker to do via CLI.
NegativeLatency 58 minutes ago [-]
MCP is great for docs and stuff, also saves tokens and reduces errors if you have something complicated you're abstracting over

- agents have old/inaccurate knowledge and it's nice to have up to date docs: https://awslabs.github.io/mcp/servers/aws-documentation-mcp-...

- geting agents to do apple builds and stuff is much easier with: https://github.com/getsentry/XcodeBuildMCP

- also for searching stuff like pdfs/epubs it's nice to have a place that's easy/fast for an agent to go to: https://github.com/nburns/doc-search-mcp

none of these strictly requrie mcp, but it is still a useful abstraction/shared convention

timq 38 minutes ago [-]
CLI certainly is better than local MCP. But nowadays, most MCPs are remote and the comparison fall short, at the notable exception of `gh` in a coding environment. But having CLI already authenticated is not guaranted either!
narvidas 1 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate on this thought? MCP vs CLI feels very much like a Apples/Oranges comparison, without additional context.
martinald 57 minutes ago [-]
MCP makes a lot, lot more sense when you think of it as as a auth standard and not a comparison with CLIs. It obviously does more than just auth, but having standardised auth (which CLIs definitely do not) is the real 'killer' feature.
jwr 57 minutes ago [-]
I am so tired of people repeating this. Usually, this results from conflating two uses of MCP: local, which can indeed be replaced by CLI (and you can argue which one is better), and remote, which is entirely different, and there is no way to replace it with a CLI (note that you are making an implicit assumption that a CLI tool can be used at all, which is not always the case).

Please don't repeat this. It's like saying that apples are dead and oranges are the future.

phpnode 1 hours ago [-]
cached thought. running CLIs is impractical and expensive in many environments and a hell of a lot less secure than using MCP
Catloafdev 1 hours ago [-]
They serve two different purposes.

Edited*

dang 59 minutes ago [-]
> Tell me you don't understand what you're saying without telling me you don't understand what you're saying.

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Your comment would be fine without that last swipe, and even better if you had gone on to say what the two purposes are. Then we could learn something from it.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Catloafdev 56 minutes ago [-]
Apologies, I appreciate you posting this!
jsmudda 1 hours ago [-]
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