Support for Model Control Protocol

[sahuguet]

Anthropic and co. announced https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction today.
It seems to be a very nice way of extending capabilities of LLM in a language neutral way.
Should GenAIScript support it?

[pelikhan]

Yes I am reading into it.

So the genaiscript could start a server and expose all scripts and tools could be exposed as "tools".

The "prompts" part of the spec is more dicey because it assumes the server returns a rendered set of messages.

Genaiscript could also be a host and consume tools/resources.

[pelikhan]

Then we could probably leverage web front end for MCP for free.

[sahuguet]

All of this makes sense.
I was more thinking about going in the other direction where GenAIScript (like Claude Desktop in their examples) would get enriched by the functionalities offered by the MCP servers.

Currently all the great GenAIScript capabilities (git, file system, Word, PDF etc.) are inside the tool itself; they could be made accessible from the outside, via MCP. And these capabilities could be used by other tools.

The Language Server analogy is the one that resonates best with me when thinking about MCP.

But I also like your idea. I think MCP could provide a natural interface, but smart agents written in GenAIScript.

Another interesting aspect (which was pioneered by GenAIScript) is the focus on running "app" on your local machine, with the user granting explicit permission about what's happening. Yes, some stuff happens in the cloud, but the important stuff happens locally.

[sahuguet]

A good comparison would be (a) https://microsoft.github.io/genaiscript/blog/support-for-agentic-tools/ vs (b) using https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/first-server/python#check-current-weather .

With (a), you need to register the tool explicitly (thankfully GenAIScript does most of the legwork for us).
With (b), you register a service for which the capabilities are discovered on the fly and invoked as needed based on the prompt.

[pelikhan]

Ha yes consuming tools would be another scenario. MCP might be the missing piece to be able to seamlessless consume python/TS tools.

defTool could support a new overload that takes the MCP server connection and parameters.

[sahuguet]

I haven't found a good example where they explain how to integrate MCP on the client side.
They only provide a JSON config file for Claude Desktop but all the magic is hidden inside their app.

I am curious if they implicitly register a tool like you do with defTool or if they do something else.
I am looking for the equivalent of createAISDKTools from https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/agentic?tab=readme-ov-file#intro .

[pelikhan]

They have a "client" type in the SDK that can start a server process. Once the server process is running, you can query the list of tools that it implements. I think we can test this out with their sample servers.

[sahuguet]

i haven't figured out how to tell the LLM it can use the resources advertised by the MCP server.

[pelikhan]

I think if you look at the prompts section in the docs you can see some resources added to the messages retuned by the server

[pelikhan]

So here is current thinking for tool support:

• support the same configuration format for mcpservers as Claude desktop (in script call or config file)
• spin up servers on cli start
• do the tool call through the typescript-sdk clients
• add resource resolution in def and fetchText

[pelikhan]

back for the break...

[pelikhan]

Here is a rough demo fo genaiscript consuming servers.

https://github.com/microsoft/genaiscript/blob/main/packages/sample/genaisrc/mcp.genai.mts

[pelikhan]

https://microsoft.github.io/genaiscript/reference/scripts/mcp-tools/