The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - A critical look at MCP (News)

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Rasmus Holm takes a critical look at MCP, Stefan Judis shares a new term he learned from Scott Hanselman, Raf beautifully describes the curse of knowing how, Void is an open source Cursor alternative & React Jam is back for its 6th online game jam.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, May 12th, 2025. Did you know that Claude's system prompt is over 24,000 tokens long? That's some serious prompt engineering. It's actually kind of fun to read, especially if you imagine Claude standing in front of the mirror giving itself a pep talk before work. Claude enjoys helping humans and sees this role

as an intelligent and kind assistant. Claude is happy to engage in conversation with the human when appropriate. Claude often illustrates difficult concepts or ideas with relevant examples. Claude does not provide information that could be used to make chemical or biological or nuclear weapons. Now go get them Claude,

you brilliant golden retriever on acid. Okay, let's get into the news. A critical look at MCP. Rasmus Holm is astonished by the apparent lack of mature engineering practices he sees as all the major players roll out model context protocol servers at a blistering pace. Quote, all the major players spend billions of dollars

on training and tuning their models only to turn around and from what I can tell, have an intern write the documentation, providing subpar SDKs and very little in terms of implementation guidance. This trend seems to have continued with MCP resulting in some very strange design decisions, poor documentation, and an even worse specification of the actual protocols." His conclusion after diving deep into his own implementation of the protocol in Go. Rasmus was gobsmacked by what he found. I'm just kind of feeling sad about it all.

It seems like the industry is peeing their pants at the moment. It feels great now, but it's going to be hard to deal with later. If peeing your pants is cool, consider the tech industry Miles Davis. Stringly Typed I learned a new software development term from Stefan Judis who learned it from Scott Hanselman who describes stringly typed as follows, quote, whenever you are passing strings around when a better type exists, end quote. In a language like TypeScript, this is rare in first party code,

but when dealing with OPC, that's other people's code, via an API, you're often still stuck with stringly typed things. This makes Stefan mad, quote, after building all these SPAs, connecting to APIs, being maintained by different teams, I've never considered it to be a huge problem. But now that I have a name for this pattern,

strangely typed interfaces started to bother me. I realize that I want type safety over the network and I don't wanna deal with strangely typed apps at all. I want all the types. End quote. Whether you agree with Stefan or not on that point, I tend not to. The term itself might prove useful to you.

And if you heard it here first, prepend me to the list of people you learned it from. Then tell a friend and get your name prepended to the list as well. The curse of knowing how. Raph beautifully describes the plight of the enlightened who don't just use computers, but have the ability to program them. Quote, before I could program,

broken software was frustrating but ignorable. For years I've simply used a computer as a consumer. I was what companies were concerned with tricking into buying their products or subscribing to their services. Not the technical geek that they prefer to avoid with their software releases or banning from their games based on an OS.

Now it has become provocative. I can see the patterns that I wish I couldn't, find oversights that I can attribute to a certain understanding or lack thereof of a certain concept, and I can hear what's been echoing in the head of the computer illiterate person who conjured the program that I have to debug."

End quote. This is problematic for a bunch of reasons. One of which, as Raph states, is that pesky thing called entropy. Software doesn't stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate, APIs change, performance regressions creep in. Your once perfect tool breaks silently because libfooso is now libfu.so.2."

Yes, we can fix computers, but we can't fix everything. So what's a dev to do? After the excitement, after the obsession, after the burnout, I'm trying to let things stay a little broken because I've realized I don't want to fix everything. I just want to feel okay in a world that often isn't. I can fix something, but not everything. You learn how to program, you learn how to fix things, but the hardest thing you'll ever learn

is when to leave them broken. And maybe that's the most human skill of all. It's now time for sponsored news. Terrence Lee shares his thoughts on the next generation of Heroku. Adam had a chance to sit down with Terrence Lee to talk about what's coming on the next generation of Heroku. Adam had a chance to sit down with Terrence Lee to talk about what's coming for the next generation of Heroku being built on open source standards.

Here's what Terrence had to say. Doodly-doo, doodly-doo, doodly-doo, doodly-doo, doodly-doo. Fur represents the next decade of Heroku. Cedar lasted for 14 years and more, still going. We've used stacks to kind of usher in this new technology. And what that means for Fur is we're replatforming on top of open standards. A lot has changed over the last decade.

Things like container images and OCI and Kubernetes and CloudNave, all these things have happened in this space. And instead of being on a real island, we're embracing those technologies and standards that we help popularize and pulling them into our technology stack. So we're providing this access to tools and things that people developers are already using and extensibility on the platform that you haven't had before.

But this, you know, sounds like a lot of change, right? And so what isn't changing and what isn't changing is the Heroku you know and love. That's about focusing on apps and on infrastructure and focusing on developer productivity. The open source cursor alternative. Welcome to Void, a fork of VS code, because everything is these days,

to use AI agents on your code base, to checkpoint and visualize changes, and to bring any model or host locally. You know, a lot like cursor, except it's not cursor. Void is entirely open source, and Void sends messages directly to providers without retaining your data. Void is also, strangely enough, backed by Y Combinator.

So while it's all open slash free slash kumbaya today, something's gotta give. I don't know what, and I don't know when, but I do know there will be more to Void's story that we don't know yet. React Jam is back. If you're a React developer or a game dev looking to try something a little different, check out the 6th edition of React Jam. It's a 10 day online event starting May 16th where devs build games using, you guessed it, React.

Sure, React isn't the go-to for game dev, but that's the fun and challenge. Past entries have included everything from simple board games to impressive 3D stuff using React 3 Fiber. It's all fun and games, literally, but there are also cash prizes up for grabs. Oh, and I'll be judging once again, so don't you dare try to bribe me with 5 star reviews in every podcast directory. Don't even try. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop

of links worth clicking on such as ChangeLog Slack is dead, Long Live Zulip, the open source maintenance fee, and the magic of software. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com slash news. This week on the pod, on Wednesday, Derek Carlson from Cinedia talks Nats vs the CNCF and on Friday our award worthy, Pound Defying Game Show returns with Mystery Guests. Have a great week, like, subscribe and leave us a 5 star review if you dig the show and I'll talk to you again real soon.