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Show HN: Mcp-use – Connect any LLM to any MCP

https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use
136•pzullo•20h ago
Hey Pietro and Luigi here, we are the authors of mcp-use (https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use).

When the first MCP servers came out we were very excited about the technology, but as soon as we wanted to get our hands dirty, we found out that MCP could be used only through Claude Desktop or Cursor. As engineers, we did not like that. MCP seemed like something you wanted to use to build products and applications yourself, not something to hide behind a closed source application.

So we approached the SDK but were pretty dissatisfied with the developer experience (double async loops, lots of boilerplate). We decided to write mcp-use to make our lives easier.

mcp-use lets you connect any LLM to any MCP server in just 6 lines of code. We provide a high level abstraction over the official MCP SDK that makes your life easier and supports all the functionalities of the protocol.

Demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_B6LZAsp4.

The key abstractions we provide are called MCPClient and MCPAgent.

MCPClient takes in a set of server configurations, automatically detects the transport type and creates a background task which handles the stream from/to the server.

MCPAgent is a combination of the MCPClient, an LLM, and a custom system prompt. It consumes the MCP client by transforming the tools, resources and prompts into model agnostic tools that can be called by the LLM.

The library also contains some cool utilities:

- secure sandboxed execution of MCP servers (we know the protocol doesn't shine for security)

- meta-tools that allow the agent to search over available servers and tools (to avoid context flooding) and connect dynamically to the server it needs (you could create the omnipotent agent with this).

Some cool things we did with this: - write an agent that can use a browser and create/read linear tickets updated with latest information on the internet

- write an agent that has access to the metrics of our company to automatically create weekly reports.

- I connected an agent to an IKEA curtain I hacked an MCP on to adapt the lighting of my room from images of the lighting situation.

- recreated am open source claude code like CLI, with full MCP capability but with custom models and BYOK (https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use-cli).

We recently crossed 100,000 download and we are used by many organizations, including NASA!

We’d love to hear what you think of it, most importantly how we can improve it! We are happy to answer any questions and look forward to your comments.

Comments

alessiapacca•20h ago
Hey, this is really cool. But why should I use this and not the official SDK?
pzullo•20h ago
I think the original SDK is quite low level, not assembly low level, but if you want to get started and expose a tool to an LLM you would have to write something in the neighborhood of ~200 lines of code, and they would have to be wrapped in a double nested async loop. If you want to develop authorization with Dynamic Client Registration, it going to be another ~1000 lines. I think many developers will want to avoid that. Plus, if the spec changes, and it does very often, you would have to keep track of it, we take care of that for you.
jonfw•16h ago
As somebody who has done both- mcp-use makes it very very simple.

If you are at all familiar w/ python back-end development, it's literally just as easy use this tool to make an API as it is to put your MCP into claude desktop.

MCP SDK is not hard to do per se... but it's more than a 5 minute job

0xDA7A•19h ago
Do you do anything to deal with the model performance degradation caused by having too many MCP tools? Would be cool to see a smart MCP router added here
pzullo•18h ago
We did! Basically we have a meta layer between the Agent and the MCP servers you give to the clients.

We call this server manager, basically instead of exposing all the tools from all the servers at once to the agent we only expose 4 meta tools: - list servers() - connect to server(server_name) - search_tool(query) - disconnect from server(server_name)

So that the agent can dynamically connect to specific servers without flooding its context with all the tools.

The search tool basically performs semantic search over all the tools from all the servers returning the top N results (tools) and the server they belong to so that the agent can connect to the right server.

A demo of this is here https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/comments/1k598v9/give_your_agen... where I hid a useful tool in a sea of useless ones (10 useful, 3000 useless) and the agent was able to find and use the right one.

hubraumhugo•18h ago
Since you're in the current YC batch, why is this a Show HN instead of a Launch HN?
dang•18h ago
I answered this question in a similar case a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43111524. If you read that and still have a question that isn't answered there, let me know!
zwaps•18h ago
I get the client part, great job!

However, the agent is really just a wrapper of Langchain AgentExecutor. This doesn't seem like something someone would want to put into production.

pzullo•18h ago
Valid feedback, we did not put as much work on the agent as we did for the client and MCP side yet, but we plan to write a cleaner more composable MCPAgent as well. Actually I would be super happy to hear what you consider a standard here, something like https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/ ?
saberience•17h ago
Huge variety of problems with this for mid-market or enterprise use. This is basically a toy right now and can’t be used for solving repeatable, valuable problems for actual businesses, ie: stuff that matters.

One: dependence on langchain.

Two: Security? Observability?

Three: You have never asked yourself, why would someone want to connect an LLM to infinite random mcp servers. The vast majority (of mcp tools and servers) are insecure, vibe coded, basically terrible.

Four: There needs to be way more focus on quality versus quantity. It’s easy to connect LLMs to MCP servers, it’s not a problem companies are willing to spend much money on, the issue is ensuring LLMs call the right tools 98%+ of the time with the right parameters.

Five: There are tons and tons of existing projects for connecting LLMs to 1000s of MCP servers, it’s not a novel project, has no technical moat, and importantly, doesn’t solve a super valuable problem.

The better question to ask or problem to solve is this, given a high value problem, how do you get high values of accurate tool use, first time, while providing security and protection against side effects, jail breaking, random issues etc.

Most companies using “mcp” have a model which is using one or two tools (max) at a time and struggling making it work consistently. Giving them a meta tool to connect to 1000s of (mostly useless) tools isn’t helpful and won’t be taken seriously.

crackalamoo•16h ago
Why is dependence on LangChain an issue?

Not that I disagree necessarily, just wondering if there's a consensus that LangChain is too opinionated/bloated/whatever for real industry applications, or if there's some other reason.

pzullo•11h ago
Not original commenter here, and not by first hand experience. BUT. I got this kind of feedback from some communities, and I wanted to understand what companies think of this, I asked some dev that works in a company that sells software to enterprise he says that enterprise still use langchain mostly and they are fine with it. On a personal level I agree with the feedback in that langchain has some drawbacks, but at the same time it's a great way to get started.
pzullo•15h ago
Hey, thanks for your detailed feedback, it's helpful to be challenged. Here are some quick thoughts:

One: We've heard similar feedback on Langchain dependency. We also heard it is still widely used in enterprise settings despite its limitations. We're actively exploring alternatives, but it is a pretty crowded space and we could not find the best alternative yet. I'm curious: is there a specific solution you'd recommend? Shall we have our own LLM layer ?

Two: Agreed on observability client-side, improvements are on our roadmap, though currently prioritized lower based on user needs. Regarding security, we manage server-side risks via sandboxes, tool restrictions, and upcoming access control features. Preventing tool poisoning client-side is something we'll look into further. You have any other specific suggestions client side ?

Three: The "infinite server" scenario is not the main focus on the library, I am sorry if that is how is sounded. It is more of an interesting solution to an interesting problem that we wanted to share.

Four: Totally agree on prioritizing quality over quantity. mcp-use emphasizes flexibility and ease of integration, not necessarily connecting to numerous servers. Reliability is a server-client joint effort, when we work with companies this is one of our main focuses.

Five: While similar solutions exist, we've found our approach resonates well with users based on adoption and feedback. That said, this is not the end of the road, we are working and talking with many companies and solving many of the issues you mentioned, most are not so easy to integrate in the library and we offer only as part of our cloud offering.

Thanks again for challenging our thinking! And please if you have inputs it'd be great to have them

mkagenius•17h ago
> MCP-Use supports running MCP servers in a sandboxed environment using E2B's cloud infrastructure.

If you want to support a local and privacy friendly sandboxed environment for code execution, you may consider something I have built, Coderunner - https://github.com/instavm/coderunner - it uses Apple's native container for hosting a jupyter server and a headless browser.

pzullo•11h ago
That is nice, is this like a local E2B ?
mkagenius•4h ago
Thank you. Yes, it is. Let me know if I can help integrating it or I can send a PR.
jonfw•16h ago
I have used mcp-use to write some demo functionality and it is very easy to use and works great!
pzullo•16h ago
Thanks, I appreciate that!
scosman•15h ago
How does the sandboxing work? Is it cross platform? Options for filesystem/netork?
pzullo•14h ago
For sanboxing we are using E2B, which spins up a sandbox for the server execution, we run the mcp server command inside the sandbox and expose the stdio stream as an sse from the sandbox remote. You could potentially replace the E2B sanbox with any other. Unfortunately, mcp servers that need access to your filesystem cannot be run on a sanbdox, I believe you could do it with the network, what would be the use case?
preem_palver•15h ago
Great idea! Definitely going to use it. What are some good reasons to prefer this over fastmcp clients? https://gofastmcp.com/clients/client
pzullo•14h ago
Hey, thanks! Please let us know if we can help with anything once you get started. FastMCP is very good at servers, they just recently started to provide a client.

The client is comparable, but we support multiple connections at once, we handle task management for you (so you do not need to async with in our code), and we have an agent that you can get started with. Also I do not think FastMCP will go into the agent side of things in the Agent - Client - Server spectrum, so if you need support on that side (integrations with other frameworks, providers etc) you'll find it here :)

jijji•14h ago
What is really interesting in this article is that no where in either the github link presented nor on his web site, mcp-use.com, does he actually explain what an "MCP" server is, what it might be used for, the benefits of doing this. It seems he is so far in the weeds with this that it was an after thought to describe what any of this means or might be useful for.
pzullo•11h ago
Hey jijji, fair point, I assumed that the hn audience and/or the people interacting with the website would already know about MCP.

If you're not familiar, MCP is an open-source protocol created by Anthropic and later adopted by all major model providers. It defines how LLMs communicate with external applications and services.

More specifically, MCP standardizes the interaction between an MCP server, where the business logic resides, and a client, loosely speaking an LLM that consumes it. The MCP server exposes primitives like tools, resources, and prompts, which the client can use to perform various operations. The communication protocol used is JSON-RPC 2.0, and interaction between the client and server occurs either locally through stdio streams or remotely over streamable HTTP.

Here are some of the good things about it:

Easier integration into agents: From an agent development perspective, MCP simplifies integrating external capabilities. Previously, you'd have to write custom integrations, which is sometimes difficult or limited by the availability of public APIs. Now, you can directly plug in an MCP server, if provided. if you had to write a custom integration, using MCP is beneficial as well, as it separates integration logic from agent logic, making it easy to hot swap any of the two.

Standardized interface and incentives for companies: Because MCP standardizes communication, developers can create MCP servers independently from the specific LLM or agent consuming them. This compatibility with clients like ChatGPT, Claude Desktop, and mcp-use provides a strong incentive for companies to develop MCP servers for their own applications. This is great because they are the ones that know best how to do this (and can).

Widespread Adoption: A protocol's value heavily depends on its adoption, and MCP is sticking real well. Companies, developers, and major model providers are mostly on board with MCP.

I'd love to know if somebody has other positive points or negative points about mcp and can share it here. Some are across the thread already.

apwell23•14h ago
it can be used via claude code on ubuntu too
pzullo•13h ago
what are you referring to ?
d4rkp4ttern•14h ago
Not sure what is going on, but I see a lot of 1-karma-point HN users hyping this.
manojlds•10h ago
Yeah I don't even see the point of this. There's enough MCP clients now and the whole point of MCP is to make tools available to any LLM that can use tools.
pzullo•10h ago
What other clients are you referring to ?
tomhow•9h ago
It's most likely just over-exuberance from people who know the founders or use/love the project and want to support it. It doesn't look orchestrated.
dang•9h ago
(tomhow and I were both replying at the same time)

I see what you mean and yeah it often happens that friends or users of a project try to "help out" in this way. It's fine on many other platforms, so it's more of a misunderstanding than anything. People don't realize that it runs against HN's culture.

I've moved those comments to a stub post now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44752791).

d4rkp4ttern•13h ago
For what it’s worth, several months ago, in Langroid (an agent framework that works with any LLM) we added an adaptor using FastMCP that translates between Langroid’s Tools and MCP tools, so effectively it’s a way to connect any LLM to any MCP server.

Https://github.com/langroid/langroid

MCP integration:

https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/mcp-tools/

pzullo•9h ago
We designed this slightly differently where one can use the client directly an not only in our agent, the structure is more focused around the MCP functionality.
redhale•37m ago
I'm confused -- I didn't see a single example in you readme or docs that uses the client WITHOUT your agent. Trying to understand if this is an alternative to FastMCP. I don't want your agent.
Tadpole9181•13h ago
I'm not sure how this relates to the comment you replied to?
d4rkp4ttern•13h ago
Related, in the sense that it is also a way to connect any LLM to any MCP. Not sure what you meant, I.e when there’s a discussion of a feature I think it’s normal to mention other systems with similar features?
d4rkp4ttern•13h ago
I see the confusion :) I meant my comment not as an actual reply to my own comment but more as an afterthought.
tomhow•9h ago
OK, we detached that comment to make it a root comment. Explained in detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44752785.
tomhow•9h ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751518 and marked it off topic.

We also detached https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751518 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751285 to make it a root comment, given that the author agreed it didn't make sense to be a reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44751620).

Tadpole9181•9h ago
Appreciate your work, Tom!
tomhow•7h ago
Very kind :)
dang•9h ago
[stub]

[explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44752814]

kenlo•20h ago
Thank you for sharing this! At Product Weaver we love how mcp-use makes our life easier when accessing MCP servers like Jira, Linear, Notion and many others. We like the clean code we can write, as it's vital for maintaining it. Ad maiora!
pzullo•20h ago
!!! Thank you so much, love to hear that !!!
jellothere•20h ago
Really great work! We’ve been integrating LLMs into production chat-based workflows for a while, and mcp-use has given us the biggest DX boost we’ve seen all year. It strips away the boilerplate of the official SDK, so spinning up a new MCP backend becomes almost a copy‑paste job.

From a company perspective that’s huge: adding a new chatbot feature that used to take a couple of sprints and a lot of glue code can now be done in hours instead of weeks.

pzullo•20h ago
That is awesome to hear, that is exactly what we had in mind when writing the library, any feedback or improvements that could reduce the work from hours to minutes now ?
cap_andrea•19h ago
Love this! Finally someone breaking open the MCP ecosystem for real dev use. mcp-use looks like the right balance between power and simplicity. The agent abstraction + tool discovery is super smart.

Also, hacking an IKEA curtain with MCP is an all-time flex.

Curious if you’re planning to build infra on top or keep it strictly dev tools?

pzullo•19h ago
Thanks so much! The ikea was such a cool thing do to, here is the video btw https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/comments/1jxdi4g/i_wrote_an_mcp...

Yes we plan to do more infrastructure work for sure, the idea is that larger teams will need a centralized place where they can configure their MCPs, monitor them, and define access control rules, create agents with specific permissions and capabilities. The old infrastructure (in the dev tool sense) does not really lend itself well to this new use cases.

We are building in this direction and we plan to open source this aspect as well, for now we are working closely with few large companies to first understand their pains deeply.

zechengz•18h ago
Love this! This is super helpful!
pzullo•18h ago
Thanks!!
xinweihe•18h ago
Super cool project — love the direction you're taking with simplifying MCP integration and tooling! The search layer between agent and servers is a clever abstraction to reduce cognitive + compute load. Also appreciate the IKEA curtain flex

Would love to see how this evolves toward more dynamic infra setups. Keep it up!

orliesaurus•15h ago
belli e bravi
pzullo•13h ago
grazie mille!
olivieropinotti•14h ago
This is super cool! Building with MCP is such a hassle right now, this is a game changer.
pzullo•13h ago
thankss! I appreciate you
valebearzotti•11h ago
nice. i feel interaction with mcps now is sort of broken, and building on top of the sdk is a pain. being compliant with the specification is a way better take.

i'm curious to see how this scales. and it's a good starting point on reshaping our interaction with basically every single application.

pzullo•11h ago
Hey thanks for the comment (xmcp in the house)! I can certainly agree with the sdk being a pain, why do you feel that the interaction is broken ? in which way ?
moron4hire•11h ago
[flagged]
pzullo•10h ago
No
pengli1707•11h ago
Good, I have not dig into the code, just one question: how to deal with other stuff supplied by MCP server, I mean besides tools, server also supplied "resources", "prompt" and other functionality, I saw some struggle here(https://github.com/vincent-pli/mcp-cli-host/blob/main/docs/r...) and here(https://github.com/vincent-pli/mcp-cli-host/blob/main/docs/p...),
maxarnold•7h ago
Introduced the tool at Porsche last week. Looks like there might be a big corporate partnership coming up
miotts•5h ago
neat idea and exec. With the # of MCPs exploding, I assume there will be different MCPs offering similar services, and selecting the "right" one will require more time for the devs. I see interesting implications in the Server Manager component that will hide the complexity under the hood (for practical and security reasons). Good job.

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