The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime

Normal APIs are promises to developers, because developer commit code that relies on those APIs, and then walk away. If you break the API, you break the promise, and you break that code. This means a developer gets woken up at 2am to fix the code

But MCP servers are called by LLMs which dynamically read the spec every time, which allow us to constantly change the MCP server. It doesn’t matter! We haven’t made any promises. The LLM can figure it out afresh every time

otiginal tweet

This is really cool

How the best teams avoid comprehension debt The best teams I’ve seen solve this problem before any code gets written.

They spend significant time planning with the AI upfront. Not just giving it a prompt and accepting whatever comes back. But going back and forth on the high-level approach. Thinking through edge cases together. Shaping the implementation before a single line gets generated.

This isn’t about slowing down. It’s about understanding what you’re building.

When you shape the implementation with the AI, two things happen:

First, the AI writes better code. Because you’ve given it more context, thought through the edge cases, and guided it toward a cleaner architecture.

But second, and this is more important, the human engineer actually understands the code. Because they shaped it. They made the key decisions. The AI just handled the mechanical work of typing it out.

Akerlof asks us to imagine ourselves buying a used car. Some cars on the lot are reliable, well-maintained gems. Others cars are lemons, the kinds of cars that can make it off the lot but are disasters waiting to happen. The sellers know which cars are which, but you, as a buyer, can’t tell the difference. That information asymmetry affects the average price in the market and eventually impacts the overall market dynamics.

The thinking goes like this: if a buyer can’t distinguish between good and bad, everything gets priced somewhere in the middle. If you’re selling junk, this is fantastic news—you’ll probably get paid more than your lemon is worth. If you’re selling a quality used car, this price is insultingly low. As a result, people with good cars leave the market to sell their stuff elsewhere, which pushes the overall quality and price down even further, until eventually all that’s left on the market are lemons.

I think we’re in the lemon stage of the internet.

(I’m super happy Frank is writing again)

I recently added a little feature to artivles and notes on this site to make things easier to share. At the bottom of every article and note, there are three links:

1. Share - uses the browsers Web Share API to open a share-sheet.
2. Copy as markdown - copies the content of the article/note as markdown
3. View as markdown - opens the current URL with an .md extension which returns the above with Content-Type: text/markdown;

Thanks to tools like Claude Code, I’m finding myself working more and more with markdown, so it makes sense for me to make any content I write available in that format too.

You can try these out on this note ↓