An excellent collaborator gave me a great gift today: the chance to talk, without taking a breath, about things that I’m interested in. They asked a simple question at some point: “what is MCP?” I could have answered with something like “an abstraction between tools like Claude desktop and external systems, like your computer or an API.”
Instead, I said something like “let me take a step back and talk about training and tokens in the context of large language models… and then I’ll talk about tools and tool-calling… and then I’ll talk about schemas and grammars and sampling… and then, finally, I can talk about MCP… but only briefly, before talking about APIs.” Good lord.
Truly, what a gift it is to just let someone talk at length about something they’re intrigued by. What grace you must have to sit and listen, knowing that there must be a better way to answer the question. What patience and kindness you must have to not point that out. We should all be so lucky to be given this time and attention.
Aneesah and I headed into San Franciso in the evening to see Ed Gamble perform at Cobb’s. We paid him attention, but of course we did. We paid money to pay attention. You might say we paid twice, in that case, but we definitely paid attention. Great show, very funny, but sat here now thinking about the stage that many of us have.
It feels good to get up on stage—real or otherwise—and perform for a bit. Not all the time, but sometimes. Feels better with an audience, even (especially, perhaps) an audience of one. I don’t think that a sold-out Cobb’s wants to hear me talk about MCP for an hour. Then again, it is San Francisco—maybe that’s exactly what they’d want.