100%. I know I’m in the “get off my lawn” phase of my career when I see things like MCP and LangChain, but know I would have been excited about them earlier in my career.
LangChain is an objectively terrible Frankenstein's monster of an API. If you were a good developer in your youth, you'd have still held it in contempt, and treat MCP with caution.
The MCP API is pretty bad, too, it's just that a paradigm is starting to emege regarding modularity, integration and agentic tooling, and MCP happens to be the only real shot in that direction st this particular moment.
How is the MCP API bad? It uses simple and widely available standards-based transports while still allowing custom transport implementations, along with a simple API that can be used easily without any libraries, in any programming language under the sun?
Could you elaborate on your issues with LangChain?
We're kinda headed towards using it as it seems to be a flexible enough abstraction that is relatively stable to work with, so I'd like to know if I'm overlooking something..?
A big soup of untyped json blobs and python, all working highly asynchronously in complicated ways.
Is this variable available in my agent’s state?
Depends! Is it an agent that started an hour ago before you made that other change? Is it in the manager state or not? Did the previous agent run correctly or not? Did something else go wrong?
Eh, more the wider cultural effects of them. Vibe coding, everyone now creating kitchen sink apps that do everything under the sun, k8s everywhere, agents everywhere. It feels like a big part of the industry has lost all focus and is sprinting towards some endless vague panacea instead of focusing on solving specific well defined business problems.
It’s always been a bit like this but it feels particularly bad since AI hit mainstream coding tooling. Just my 2c :)
