Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / The Creator of FastMCP Explains the Future of MCP
Transcript
- 0:00I came to New York, to the Dev Summit to give a talk, and I had
- 0:03been working and working and working on my slides, and I got
- 0:06here to the hotel and I opened my computer and my open call had
- 0:08decided, and it's in its exuberance to help.
- 0:11And it's infinite wisdom. It's infinite wisdom.
- 0:13It had decided to delete all of my slides.
- 0:15I have now built a piece of software that I think is a
- 0:17really clean way of going from zero to 60 on building a server
- 0:20in like 2 seconds. So I put it in the world and
- 0:22honestly, I kind of forget about it.
- 0:25I think I have an opinion that most people here at the
- 0:27conference don't share, which is based on experience, and I'm
- 0:30pretty confident it's right. All right, so give me the story
- 0:45of Fast MCP. You want dive right in on that.
- 0:47Let's go right to it. Let's go fast, MCP.
- 0:50So the MCP is announced November of 2024 and I see it and, and as
- 0:56you know, as we were talking prefect, we're all about
- 0:57workflows and connecting software and gluing things
- 1:00together. And so I've been, I've been
- 1:01trying to figure out for a few years, what does it mean to
- 1:04automate the agents? Like how do we plug them into
- 1:07our software ecosystem? And so MCP has announced and I'm
- 1:10like, maybe this is the thing. Maybe this is finally the
- 1:13protocol and it's from a big enough company.
- 1:14It's going to be the thing. And I try to use it and it's
- 1:17just really hard to use the SDK is complicated.
- 1:19It takes me a couple hours to set up a basic server, and as I
- 1:24may have a tendency to do. What was the first server you
- 1:26tried to set up? I don't even remember anymore.
- 1:28It was probably like to say hi like it was just, it was just
- 1:30complicated to set up. It was, it was just a test and I
- 1:33end up writing a piece of software to make it easier to
- 1:37build servers and I call it fast MCP and I put it in the world.
- 1:41I've by this time I've forgotten the point.
- 1:43I, I don't even like, I couldn't tell you what server I was
- 1:45trying to build, but I've now built a piece of software that I
- 1:47think is a really clean way of going from zero to 60 on
- 1:50building a server in like 2 seconds.
- 1:52So I put it in the world and honestly, I kind of forget about
- 1:55it. It's like a thing.
- 1:56It's a little side project. And I go back to building
- 1:59workflows for people. And I get a call from David
- 2:01Soriapara maybe a couple weeks later and he says, listen, this,
- 2:05this is a really good developer experience.
- 2:07Could we put this in the official SDK?
- 2:10Can this become how people build MCP servers?
- 2:12And I was like, yeah, this is the coolest thing that's ever
- 2:15happened to me, that Anthropic would want to to use this open
- 2:18source software. So I worked with David and he
- 2:21ported it into the SDK. And to this day, if you use the
- 2:25official SDK, you import a fast MCP object and you build your
- 2:28server with it. And honestly, that would have
- 2:31been that. And that could have been the end
- 2:32of the story. What changed is exactly a year
- 2:35ago, Google and Open AI both announced that they were going
- 2:39to support MCP. And that's when the hype
- 2:41started, which I think is why we're here today at the at the
- 2:44Dev Summit, right? Because the hype, the hype train
- 2:46left the station. And when they announced that was
- 2:48going to happen, I think it was the catalyst that that we needed
- 2:52as a community to start taking this technology seriously.
- 2:55And I found out about this because my repo, which is
- 2:58essentially defunct at the time because everything had moved to
- 3:01the official SDK, my repo started getting thousands of
- 3:05GitHub stars and issues and requests and people asking for
- 3:09things that I realized were not appropriate for a low level SDK.
- 3:12People were asking for off and composability and the things you
- 3:16would expect from like an application like an MCP
- 3:18application framework. And I kind of hemmed and hawed
- 3:21on this for a while, but there was so much demand that it just
- 3:24seems like we should meet it. And so we restarted Fast MCP as
- 3:29a standalone project with Fast MCP 2 exactly a year ago and it
- 3:34grew and grew and grew and gets downloaded millions of times a
- 3:38day and 25,000 GitHub stars. I don't even know.
- 3:42It's been, it's just been a remarkably successful open
- 3:45source project. And, and, and that sort of
- 3:48brought us into this ecosystem in this community from a very
- 3:51different perspective. I think we, we, we had figured
- 3:54out recently that something like 70% of all MCP servers are
- 3:57written on either our Fast MCP or the, the official SDK fast
- 4:01MCP. So it's just it's kind of become
- 4:03the standard way that people build MCP servers and it's given
- 4:05us this fascinating insight into like what's going on, what
- 4:09people are doing. What should I keep in mind when
- 4:12building with fast MCP? Are there any gotchas that I
- 4:15need to know about or any trade-offs?
- 4:16You know, there, there are, but they're, they're
- 4:18well-intentioned so fast. MCP is an opinionated framework.
- 4:21And what I mean by that is we have an opinion on a certain
- 4:24kind of MCP server, a certain experience of building it.
- 4:28We we try to be, you know, as flexible as possible.
- 4:31If you're building this kind of down the fairway normal MCP
- 4:36server, you're going to have an amazing experience.
- 4:38If you want to turn every little knob and every configuration and
- 4:42every possible way beyond that, you're probably better off going
- 4:45to the SDK and getting as close to the protocol as you can.
- 4:48And I think this is this is a really healthy tension.
- 4:50The SDK is the low level way to work with a protocol and fast
- 4:55MCP is for 90% of people probably the easiest way to skip
- 4:59all of that and just get a server.
- 5:01It's literally in the name. It's.
- 5:02Literally in the name. It's a fast way of doing it.
- 5:04And, and the reason it's named that, it's funny, if I knew how
- 5:06popular it was going to be, maybe I wouldn't named it that.
- 5:08Although now seeing how popular it is, I'm like, maybe the name
- 5:10has something to do with that. But it's but it's very much an
- 5:12homage to Fast API which is. The Sebastian.
- 5:16Exactly which is the high level entry point to the Python web
- 5:20world on top of Starlet as its low level SDK.
- 5:23And so most people writing most servers will use fast API to
- 5:27skip a lot of the hard work. But some people will go straight
- 5:30into Starlight for the low level.
- 5:32And so we wanted to occupy a similar sort of space in
- 5:34people's mind mindset. Yeah, I thought it was fast just
- 5:38because it you can set up an MCP server so fast.
- 5:40I mean, you can do that too. Yeah, it works really well.
- 5:42So it's been this journey of, you know, from from day 2
- 5:45basically of MCP having essentially this front row seat
- 5:49to the growth and being there when nobody cared about it.
- 5:51And now, now how ridiculous the, you know, MCP is dead and all
- 5:56this stuff. Our our team threw a funeral for
- 5:57MCP. Last night for April Fools.
- 5:59OK, I was going to ask, is it an April Fools thing or was it
- 6:04because you were just jumping on the hype?
- 6:07It was conveniently an April Fool's thing.
- 6:11I think we decided that this was the thing to do, to poke fun at
- 6:15the whole debate. And then we suddenly realized it
- 6:17was also going to be on April Fool's and was like, oh, this is
- 6:19perfect, we have to do this. And we did it last night and it
- 6:22was an enormous success. There was a celebration of life.
- 6:25It was a. Celebration of life and we had a
- 6:27string quartet singer and we passed MCP apps.
- 6:30Did you have a open casket? We did not have an open casket
- 6:34because there was no, there was no body to be found.
- 6:37That's the thing about something that's not really dead, but I, I
- 6:41do, I do think it's ridiculous that that this is the charge.
- 6:44And I don't know as you and I were were chatting earlier
- 6:47though, I think that there is a, a small degree of legitimacy in
- 6:52the charge that this MCP server could be a CLI.
- 6:55There are some MCP servers that are not good and there are many
- 7:00MCP clients that do nothing more than download every single tool
- 7:04they find on a server and shove them into an LM's brain.
- 7:07And I think if that's what the client is doing, then the charge
- 7:09that you would be better off for the CLI is not a not terrible
- 7:14like, like we, we need to be honest, we need to confront what
- 7:17enabled folks to make that charge.
- 7:20That action of downloading every single tool and shoving them
- 7:23into an LM has very little to do with what MCP is supposed to do
- 7:26and enable it is the worst version of the simplest feature.
- 7:31And I think one thing that I was talking about here at the
- 7:34conference is I think that last year the name of the game was to
- 7:37drive adoption of MCP. And so we tolerated MCP clients
- 7:42that took this sort of one O 1 approach to what it meant to be
- 7:46an MCP client. And one of the things that I'm
- 7:48really excited for us to do in 2026 is build rich enough MCP
- 7:52experiences that it forces clients to step up.
- 7:56Well, you have a very opinionated view of how to do
- 7:59that right? I do fast MCP and probably just
- 8:01in your own buildings. What are some things I.
- 8:04Do so for us, there's a, there's a few things that we've that
- 8:07we've noticed. So, so there's this thing that
- 8:11I, that I believe that I know that I don't know that everybody
- 8:15here is maybe aware of. I wouldn't say that they
- 8:17necessarily are ignorant of. But the one thing that I believe
- 8:21that I'm not sure everybody else believes is that the number one
- 8:24use case for MCP is inside the four walls of a company for
- 8:27people in the company to deliver data and information and
- 8:31business logic to other people in the same company.
- 8:33Wow, OK. I mean, I've heard that a lot
- 8:36with like internal AP is that same kind of idea, but I haven't
- 8:41heard anybody say that that is one of the greatest use cases I.
- 8:45I really think it is just just based on who we see showing up
- 8:48and building servers and what they want to do and what their
- 8:50concerns are. And this is not something that I
- 8:52expected to be clear, but. Is it, is that not just a
- 8:55maturity thing because we're so early still?
- 8:58I so I, I could believe that. So it's, it's not that I don't
- 9:02think MCP will ever be like broadcast to a company's
- 9:04customers or anything like that. But I think many people,
- 9:08including myself, expected that the number one thing that would
- 9:11happen with MCP is I as an individual would write some
- 9:14logic that I want your agent to be able to consume.
- 9:17And here's how I'll do it. And then I as a company will
- 9:20want my customers to access my API through MCP and that's what
- 9:22we'll do. And so I think that that is very
- 9:24much in scope and I'm very excited about that.
- 9:27But I think what has stopped it, if there's one thing that has
- 9:30like become the friction, it's actually that you just, you
- 9:32don't know what the client is capable of except maybe tool
- 9:36calls. And it's hard to maybe ship a
- 9:39very exciting server to a client you don't know or control or
- 9:42trust inside your company, though I know what the client
- 9:46is. I don't have a trust boundary
- 9:47problem. I can ship more interesting
- 9:49code, I can ship a richer code, I can take advantage of more
- 9:51features. And so I think that's one
- 9:54dimension. Yeah, you're flipping the
- 9:56narrative on the head a little bit because it was very much
- 10:00sold to us as, look, this is how you interact with my thing, yes.
- 10:05Exactly this. Is your USBC remember that was
- 10:07the thing for the. Internet exactly.
- 10:09And I think that's all true. I I like that I think that will
- 10:12happen, but that adoption is much.
- 10:15I don't I don't even know if it's fair for me to say it's
- 10:17slower than I expected. It's the this other use case,
- 10:21this first party use case is exploding and we're we're seeing
- 10:25it, which has been especially interesting for us at Prefect
- 10:28because of who our customers are.
- 10:29Is we're seeing it especially among data teams, platform
- 10:33teams, ML teams, the same folks that we've been serving for
- 10:37years and helping them build the workflows that hydrate the
- 10:39dashboards and the models and stuff.
- 10:41I think that they either came to view or had thrust upon them a
- 10:47view that MCP solves this self-serve data platform
- 10:52problem, finally, that that every vendor under the sun has
- 10:55tried to solve and no one's been able to, like, handle the
- 10:57Infinity of complexities. So what do you do?
- 11:00The first version of this was a data team standing up an MCP
- 11:03server in front of the data warehouse and saying, look, we
- 11:05don't want to write another query for you.
- 11:07Just ask your agent to write the query and do it.
- 11:09And they did that for a week. And then the agent took down the
- 11:11warehouse and ran up a huge bill because it did select star and
- 11:14Big Query or who knows what. Yeah, exactly.
- 11:16It doesn't have any idea of what cost money.
- 11:19It really doesn't. For something that's supposed to
- 11:21to be so superhuman and you got to.
- 11:23Have a fin op skill and make sure that like this is our CFO
- 11:28skill and make sure that we do not spend more than a grand per
- 11:31query and it's. And it's all data warehouse, you
- 11:33know, precise. It's like big query.
- 11:36You need to work like this click house.
- 11:37These are the kinds of query you need to make.
- 11:40I actually need that in my life. I.
- 11:41Know I've made some of. Those mistakes.
- 11:44And so I think I think that that, you know, there was this
- 11:46evolution of first you plug it into the into the into the data
- 11:49warehouse and then you use a tool like fast NCP to maybe
- 11:51curate that a little bit and and not just give raw access.
- 11:54And before you know it, you have now actually built a self-serve
- 11:58data platform. And I, I don't think this is
- 12:01like uniquely the only use case, but we were shocked when the
- 12:06folks who showed up to talk to us about MCP, honestly, just
- 12:09because they see fast MCP in the world, most of them don't even
- 12:11realize it's prefect at first. There's this fast MCP, they
- 12:13assumed it was a company. They were like, oh, we want to
- 12:16talk to fast MCP. And I was like, well, I guess
- 12:19that's us. We, we, we would just, we would
- 12:22just hear over and over from the same folks that we were talking
- 12:25to in the data side. I think with one critical
- 12:28difference, which is on the data side, you're trying to justify
- 12:30the cost of this thing. It's a workflow, it's a it's an
- 12:33internal thing on the MCP side. Because of the hype, you have CE
- 12:37OS who are saying things like we must have MCP.
- 12:40But Prefect was open source, right?
- 12:43Prefect is open source. So yeah, I imagine that you were
- 12:48talking to a lot of people on the open source side with
- 12:50Prefect, and then they come and they're like, wait, same guy?
- 12:54Yeah, I feel like I know you from somewhere there.
- 12:56There was a surprising, I think one of the first customer calls
- 12:59we ever did was one of our customers, one of our then
- 13:03customers at Prefect, one of our first customer calls for the,
- 13:05for the Fasten speed product, which is called Horizon was one
- 13:08of our customers who did not fully realize it because it was
- 13:11a, it was, you know, we launched under a different name a few
- 13:13months ago. We hadn't fully brought it into
- 13:14the Prefect, you know, product family yet.
- 13:16And he gets on, he's like, I know you guys, we run all our
- 13:19data pipelines on your software. You do NCP 2.
- 13:22And we had this weird question where people like, well, how can
- 13:24you possibly know about both? Which is a really interesting
- 13:27charge. And I think my point of view is,
- 13:30well, it's we do know about both, but what we really know
- 13:32about is building software that makes things accessible to
- 13:34people. And then we take on the
- 13:36responsibility of learning all the insurance and the outs and
- 13:38the best practices of a data platform or an AI platform or
- 13:42whatever you want to call it. So the.
- 13:45The idea is still the same, abstracting away that complexity
- 13:49so that I can get what I want to get done in a easier and nicer
- 13:53developer experience. We, we, we want to make
- 13:55complicated things simple. And I love Python.
- 13:59My whole career is thanks to Python in some way, shape or
- 14:01form. I think it's an amazing way to
- 14:03express what you want to do and make it readable and everything.
- 14:07And so a lot of what we do could be kind of boiled down to like,
- 14:10we take complicated things, we make them feel like Python.
- 14:12And if they feel like Python, a lot of people find it
- 14:14accessible. And now all of a sudden you can
- 14:17do things that you maybe wouldn't know how to do or maybe
- 14:21would struggle to figure out the best practices for.
- 14:23And so one way that I really like to think about the software
- 14:25we build a prefect across the whole product portfolio is it's
- 14:28about embedding best practices in software so that you don't
- 14:32have to learn the best practices of this protocol or when to send
- 14:36a ping or, you know, all these weird little quirks that there
- 14:39are. You can just focus on the thing
- 14:40that you were hired to do, which is probably related to something
- 14:43unique to your company. And we'll worry about all the
- 14:46like connectivity of that to this broader landscape of best
- 14:49practices. Well, getting.
- 14:50Back to the opinionated nature of this, I know that with
- 14:54Prefect, you have some very magical moments when you're
- 14:58using it and you go like, look, you just type this and then that
- 15:02happens. Wow.
- 15:04And I've been in calls where people have showed others that
- 15:08and they've gone, wait, what? No, that's all you got to do.
- 15:12Oh my God. And how are you taking that same
- 15:15approach? Like, what are some things
- 15:17you're doing with MCP now that gives that magical experience
- 15:20because it is opinionated. And you say, look, we got to do
- 15:22it like this. We're going to extract away all
- 15:24this complexity, but we're going to give you those magical
- 15:27experience. Yeah.
- 15:28So I actually learned the hard way you can take that too far in
- 15:31some of the very first prefet calls.
- 15:33This is 8 years ago, but just to go in The Time Machine for a
- 15:36second, in those very first calls you we had to write less
- 15:40prefet code than you do today to get the same outcome.
- 15:43We worked really hard at that. Like today it's pretty minimal
- 15:45in port decorate like you're basically done.
- 15:48We were doing more. It was so magical and we showed
- 15:51it to a very early. And they didn't.
- 15:53Believe we were doing anything. And so it's this fascinating
- 15:56product lesson about you need the exact right amount of like
- 15:59constructive friction, let's call it, right?
- 16:01We don't want to be in your way, but we want you to.
- 16:05We want to create an expectation of what's about to happen.
- 16:07And if it's too magical, you are robbed of this opportunity to
- 16:11form an expectation about how to reason about your own software.
- 16:14And in a very early version, we went too far.
- 16:16So it's an art, it's not a science, it.
- 16:19Reminds me of how you don't want to give somebody a search result
- 16:22too fast, otherwise they think that you didn't search through
- 16:25all the documents. Yeah.
- 16:26Yeah. Aren't there studies like like
- 16:28you? You put this tiny like 100
- 16:29millisecond? Because otherwise people would
- 16:32be like, no, it didn't work, It didn't search everything
- 16:34exactly. There is a such thing as being
- 16:35too magical. And in Python it's so easy to be
- 16:37too magical. So this is this is an art.
- 16:39This is something you have to develop an intuition for.
- 16:43So in fast MCP we do it in a few ways.
- 16:45One of them is one that I hope most people never figure out
- 16:48which is that if you actually try to use the low level SDK,
- 16:50you might, it might take you an hour to like build a server and
- 16:53register all the handlers and, and in fast MCP it's very
- 16:57similar to prefect import decorate like you're done, you
- 16:59have a server. And so we're at a point where
- 17:01it's so prevalent, I'm not sure if people understand how magical
- 17:04that is. Where the magic really comes
- 17:07from, I think is we, we bend over backwards to make sure that
- 17:10when you set up a function that returns something interesting
- 17:15like like a pigantic model or like a table or something like
- 17:19that, we serialize it appropriately in the, in the
- 17:23protocol context. And so there's again, we're in
- 17:26the insurance and outs of what's best practice.
- 17:28The protocol can just send texts to the LLM because that's what
- 17:31it's expecting to get just a bunch of tokens.
- 17:33But there's also ways to send structured data and structured
- 17:35information. But in order to do that, you
- 17:37have to declare your schema upfront.
- 17:39You have to conform to that schema or the protocol will
- 17:42reject it. There's lots of stuff you have
- 17:43to do. I don't want my users to have to
- 17:45think so hard about their functions that now they can't
- 17:48return a dictionary from their function because the first they
- 17:50have to figure out how to declare a schema for it.
- 17:53And so we come up with developer experiences where if you tell us
- 17:57I'm going to return a a user, we're like, great, we have all
- 18:00the information we need to wire up the protocol for you.
- 18:03Just promise me you're going to return a user so that the
- 18:05protocol's happy and we're good to go.
- 18:07And I mean, who knows how many lines of code we're, we're,
- 18:10we're saving there a lot. But it's little things like that
- 18:14where my, my philosophy and all the software is to use one more
- 18:18feature should be one more line of code.
- 18:20I think that's a really nice. I don't know if we can literally
- 18:22do it every time, but like both in prefect and fast MCP, if you
- 18:25want to do one more thing, I'd like it to be one more line of
- 18:28code. And with this, is it dynamic so
- 18:32that I'm I'm saying I'm going to return a user, you understand,
- 18:35OK, this is what the user looks like today, but potentially that
- 18:40schema changes tomorrow, yes. Schema changes are really weird
- 18:44thing in the MCP because there's no programmatic client out there
- 18:48that's locked in. It's an LLM who every single
- 18:50time shows up and they learn the schema.
- 18:52So changing schemas is actually like blessedly easy.
- 18:56You just change it. You, you change your user model.
- 18:58And as long as you've annotated that function as returning the
- 19:00same user model, we will pick up the change the next time the
- 19:03server is run and it will just work and it will just flow
- 19:07through. And, and the goal is not for you
- 19:09to know that we did something magical, which is why maybe it's
- 19:13a, it's a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
- 19:15Like in the sense everything we do is to save you from ever
- 19:18seeing the protocol. You should write business logic
- 19:22that, if not for the fact that it was in an MCP server, would
- 19:25look exactly the same as if you wrote it in any other context.
- 19:28That's my goal with fast MCP, same goal with Prefect.
- 19:31You should write business logic that is being fully orchestrated
- 19:35and made resilient and all these great things that we do as an
- 19:38orchestrator. But you should not write your
- 19:40code any differently because it's going to be orchestrated.
- 19:43You should not write your code any differently because it's
- 19:45going to be an MCP server, except to the extent that you
- 19:47want to take advantage of features in either, of course.
- 19:52And so that's the guide. That's how we write magic
- 19:54software is we try to make it feel like you're not using MCP.
- 19:59We try to make it feel like you're writing Python.
- 20:01And by the way, now any agent in the world will be able to.
- 20:06Call your tool and use your business logic and and take
- 20:08advantage of this stuff which is which has been great.
- 20:10OK, so the magic of that the schema, I think this is probably
- 20:16a good Segway into let's talk about MCP apps.
- 20:21Let's talk about MCP apps I. Know you're pretty you're pretty
- 20:24stoked on right I'm. Really excited about MCP apps.
- 20:25Tell me more. MCP apps is something that's
- 20:27been that's been growing in the ecosystem for some time.
- 20:31It started as MCPUI thanks to some really amazing
- 20:34partnerships, it now encompasses ChatGPT apps and, and, and it's
- 20:39become this new top level spec extension called MCP apps.
- 20:42And the idea is very simple. You can now ship AUIA full UI
- 20:50arbitrarily complex to your users and it shows up in line in
- 20:54their chat with their agent. And so you can imagine from the
- 20:58point of view of MCP as a way to reach your customers and.
- 21:01Your database. And and and your databases, of
- 21:03course, all all into the spectrum, but from what you're
- 21:05talking to your customers, this is amazing.
- 21:07You can now ship your website to them.
- 21:09Are you an e-commerce store now when you ask the agent like hey.
- 21:15Is there a? Shirt I should buy It can show
- 21:18you AUI with all the shirts. You can buy one right there.
- 21:21You could preview them, you could save your preferences, you
- 21:24could log into your account even it's a full UI embedded in your
- 21:27chat. Theoretically you could say what
- 21:30do I look like with this on and then it'll generate the image
- 21:34right there with you. And, and maybe they do that as
- 21:36something they ship only to agents and it's not in their
- 21:38main website because you don't have a good way to interact with
- 21:40them over there. So this it's, it gives you the
- 21:42potential to build these incredibly rich experiences.
- 21:46But we already talked about the fact that I have a belief that
- 21:50the number one use case here is actually not reaching your
- 21:52customers, it's reaching your team.
- 21:54And so when you think about your team, they have a different set
- 21:57of needs of UIS. Most companies have countless
- 22:02internal tools and internal UIS and internal dashboards and 1000
- 22:07different ways of visualizing information and working with
- 22:10working with data. And all of a sudden we have a
- 22:12technology where the same agents that many of those teams are now
- 22:15using to interact with the business can actually show them
- 22:17more than just text. It can show them a dashboard, a
- 22:20chart, a table, a form. To that self-serve.
- 22:24Exactly this is this is what do we log into our dashboards every
- 22:27day to see a table, a graph, whatever it is now we can get
- 22:30those on demand and we can get them in our chat.
- 22:32We don't have to go to another place.
- 22:34And so I, I started really wondering about this because
- 22:39there's, there's a small thing I, I'm not crazy about with MCP
- 22:42apps, which is sort of an unreasonable expectation for me
- 22:46to have, but it's a different ecosystem from my Python
- 22:49ecosystem. They're front ends, they're
- 22:51written in HTML and JavaScript and CSS.
- 22:54And historically Python is just not a place where you would, I
- 22:57mean, you wouldn't even dream of doing that.
- 22:59But I, I wasn't crazy about the idea that our fast MCP user base
- 23:04and the majority of MCP servers are written in Python.
- 23:06I wasn't crazy about the idea that our fast MCP user base
- 23:09would have to go and build their MCP apps in a different
- 23:12ecosystem. There's there's a argument that
- 23:16I find very unconvincing that just will have an LLM do it so
- 23:19great. Obviously an LLM could do that
- 23:21and there are many skills for doing this.
- 23:23Front end skills? Yeah, exactly.
- 23:25Front end skills, but the but the challenge is not building
- 23:27it. The challenge is now it is part
- 23:29of your server. It is it is part of a stack and
- 23:32it has things you know it needs to call tools on your server.
- 23:35That means it needs the name of the tool on the server.
- 23:37There's just, it's just the complexity surface has just
- 23:39exploded and our ability to assist you in fasten CP has not
- 23:44changed at all because you are essentially outside of our
- 23:47ecosystem in a black box. And I started wondering like how
- 23:50can I help my users take advantage of this feature if the
- 23:53feature is entirely outside of our ecosystem and the all right?
- 23:58It's landing for me now. So that's the sort of challenge.
- 24:01The solution was rooted in this insight that most use cases of
- 24:08NCP apps today are not going to be full polished branded front
- 24:13end experiences. They're going to be a bunch of
- 24:15tables and charts. And like I, I, I know the state
- 24:18space, it's a constrained problem.
- 24:20And so the other insight that I had is we don't need to build
- 24:23UIS as much as we sort of just need to compose and parameterize
- 24:28them. What do I want to show?
- 24:29I want to show a data table and a chart.
- 24:30Great. Can I come up with a Python DSL
- 24:33for composing pre-existing UI components in a way that makes
- 24:37sense and that is connected to my MCP server?
- 24:39And it took a little bit of trial and error and by a little
- 24:42bit I mean about a month. But we came up with ADSL that I
- 24:46think is really clean for it's all Python context managers and
- 24:50you just declare the UI you want.
- 24:53And in fast MCP you return that UI from a tool.
- 24:57And fast MCP does all the rest and wires up all the UI in the
- 25:00the application, everything. And the the result is you go
- 25:02from having a tool that returns the records from a transactions
- 25:06database to a tool that returns an Interactive Data table with
- 25:10the exact same records in it. It's a one line code change.
- 25:12Just return a data table from your tool fast MCP does all the
- 25:16work. And when you're in your, in your
- 25:17chat, let's say you use Claude and you're just chatting and you
- 25:20say, show me the, show me the transactions.
- 25:22And up comes a fully interactive component.
- 25:24You can filter, you can sort, you can interact with it.
- 25:27And most importantly, it doesn't go into the context window of
- 25:30the LLM. So we don't pollute the context
- 25:33window with thousands of records.
- 25:35It comes to me as a user, I interact with it and.
- 25:37Wait, how does that work? You lost me.
- 25:39Sorry, it's just by design. It's the way the MC apps work is
- 25:43the information going to the app is just takes a different route.
- 25:46It doesn't. It doesn't go into the LLM and
- 25:48then to the user. It's just goes directly to the
- 25:50user in a UI. But the LLM is generating that
- 25:54the. LLM can generate that.
- 25:55There are apps that take the LLMS input to generate that.
- 25:59But in the example that I have, the LLM might see a tool called
- 26:03Show Transactions and it calls that tool with no arguments and
- 26:06the result of that tool shows up as AUI that only I see.
- 26:09The LLM doesn't see. The LLM will get a little note
- 26:12like, hey, I showed Jeremiah the thing you asked for.
- 26:15So it gets a confirmation that the tool call was successful,
- 26:18but you do not need to send it all the information.
- 26:21And so for a lot of our users who are using MCP to explore,
- 26:26you know, 100,000 rows in a database, the last thing you
- 26:30want to do is give those to your LLM so it can filter through
- 26:33them and use up all of its context, right?
- 26:34And so now we have a way to actually deliver that.
- 26:37And it's not just bypassing the LLM, it's actually in a
- 26:39beautiful and maybe preferred form.
- 26:42So this is, I'm super excited about this.
- 26:44We just announced it today at the conference.
- 26:45It's called Prefab, is the name of the library because it's
- 26:48prefabricated UI components that you.
- 26:50Stitched it together. It works, it works nicely.
- 26:52We actually put thought into that name, unlike Fast MCP.
- 26:55And so I'm super excited about that.
- 26:57I, I, I introduced it today, we released it today alongside a
- 27:00version of fast MCP that has full native support for it.
- 27:03And so my hope is in the same way we talked a moment ago about
- 27:05how you know, if you return something from your tool Fast
- 27:08MCP, make sure it has that structured form for the LM.
- 27:11So now if you return any prefab component component from your
- 27:15tool, like a pie chart or a data table or both, Fast MCP will
- 27:21automatically turn them into an MCP app and render them in your
- 27:25client for you. And it's that's what starts to
- 27:27feel super magical, yeah. Because the way that I have been
- 27:30doing it is using the playground skill and saying, you know, use
- 27:35the playground skill and give me a data visualization of XYZ,
- 27:38whatever it is I'm trying to do. But that does exactly what
- 27:42you're saying. It throws everything into the
- 27:43context window and then it will create the visualization.
- 27:48Yeah. The playground scale is amazing.
- 27:49I use it all the time. I use it to explore potential
- 27:53like like like code changes and stuff like.
- 27:56How will this ripple out through the code?
- 27:57Base or finding and debugging stuff.
- 27:59It gives you a nice visual on it and then you can it's.
- 28:02Amazing. I love the playground scale, but
- 28:03you're correct. What it's really doing is it's
- 28:05taking information already in the context and it's using that
- 28:08to build a visualization. And this is a little bit
- 28:11different. This is I as a server author
- 28:13know what app I want to build. An app here is doing a lot of
- 28:18work right. What visualization I want is
- 28:21another SO. The visualizations are in a way
- 28:23they're pre built or they're predetermined exactly.
- 28:26So as a tool you have pie chart tool exactly.
- 28:31Or or you would have a tool called Sales Trends and when you
- 28:37call that tool, the tool logic would go load the sales data,
- 28:41bring it back, but instead of just returning it raw like we
- 28:43would bring. Yours as a pie chart it.
- 28:46Returns a pie chart or returns a line chart or.
- 28:47Whatever. Whatever you declare.
- 28:49Whatever. The server author wants or take
- 28:51a parameter chart type and let the LLM decide, and then we can
- 28:56do that dynamically because we're executing code and then
- 28:58we're returning. The component that matches.
- 29:00And you get the visualization you want, where this gets very
- 29:02crazy if you really want to. Push this down the rabbit, we
- 29:05can. Always cut we can always cut
- 29:07those if it's too weird. Where this gets crazy, but I
- 29:09think it's really exciting is what the playground skill does
- 29:11is it let's Claude generate that UI dynamically and on the fly.
- 29:16We can do the same thing with prefab.
- 29:19This is a little bit weirder, but very fun.
- 29:22I, I tweeted a demo of it the other night.
- 29:23I, I asked Claude with this, with this skill and this and
- 29:28this ability, I said, make me a like a fake dashboard.
- 29:31And then you just watch it just streaming in like knobs and
- 29:35whistles and graphs. And it's just streaming in and
- 29:37it's making it up to, to suit the example I gave it.
- 29:40And what we're doing is we are not predefining the prefab
- 29:46components in the server. What we're actually doing is we
- 29:50tell the LLM, this is how you write a prefab UI.
- 29:54Like this is the Python code that would generate a UI if we
- 29:57wrote it in the server. And then we ask it to write
- 30:00Python code and we take its Python code, we execute it, we
- 30:04figure out what UI it wanted to build, and then we return that
- 30:07and render it as an app. And so the LLM this is, you
- 30:10don't have to use it this way. Just to be clear, it's a little
- 30:13science fiction and out there, but the idea is let's say you
- 30:16want a visualization of something but you didn't know in
- 30:19advance what it was going to be. So you have tools that return a
- 30:22bunch of data let's just say, so the data can get to the LLM but
- 30:25now it wants to build a custom visualization for you.
- 30:28If you have prefab installed you could expose a tool that lets
- 30:32the LLM generate AUI for you on the fly that you never pre
- 30:37declared and. It gives you that flexibility it
- 30:41gives. You a ton of flexibility to.
- 30:42Allow the LLM to choose the best tool for the moment exactly.
- 30:46And so you might end up with a graph, you might end up with a
- 30:49page full of graphs. You might end up with an
- 30:51interactive thing. You might end up with a form.
- 30:53It might want to collect information from you through
- 30:55this form. It's, it's very cool.
- 30:56There's a, there's a, there's a clawed feature I really like
- 30:59where you're using clawed and all of a sudden like a multiple
- 31:02choice box will pop up. And it's like, which of these is
- 31:04the thing that you really mean here?
- 31:05You know what I'm talking about? Or you click.
- 31:07So I think that's a great feature.
- 31:08So that's a great example of one of these mini apps where we can
- 31:12give the LLM an app and let it at any time bring up this app
- 31:18that asks you to make a selection.
- 31:20Claude doesn't need this app. Claude can do it on its own, but
- 31:23every other client that hasn't implemented this as a first
- 31:25party concern, I should actually bake it into my server and make
- 31:29this available to any client. And so I see MCP apps as not
- 31:33just a way to say here's a pretty visualization so I don't
- 31:36have to like write you a novel about it or talk like a pirate
- 31:40about it. Here's what it actually looks
- 31:41like. You can go step beyond that and
- 31:44actually start to introduce new functionality and new.
- 31:46Well, yeah, let's let's pull on that thread because I have a lot
- 31:49of functionality that I've been wanting to see for ages and it's
- 31:52not happening. I guess I'm not talking loud
- 31:54enough about it. None.
- 31:56Of it tell me if this is possible.
- 31:57Now when I'm getting an answer back, a lot of times I want to
- 32:03highlight a part of that answer and then I want to ask a
- 32:07question specifically about the highlighted part.
- 32:09And so I ended up, you know how I worked around this, I built a
- 32:14quick little bot that I, if I'm in Google Docs, I can highlight
- 32:20and comment on something and tag the bot and then it will ping
- 32:23out to an LLM and it reads the context of the highlighted stuff
- 32:28and then it reads my comment and then it will give the answer.
- 32:31Oh, wow. But isn't that a great?
- 32:33Like, am I the only one that has had that use case?
- 32:36It can't be no. All the time I'm like, I want to
- 32:38dive in on this specific, Yeah. Just that one little thing.
- 32:41I think it's a beautiful use case.
- 32:42I think. I don't think NCP apps are
- 32:44enough. I think the fact that you had to
- 32:47highlight It's like requires a first party UX.
- 32:50Decision. And NCP apps are like, if I can
- 32:54get you to opt into this. So I mean, could we invent it?
- 32:57Yes, we could invent an NCP app where you said to it.
- 33:00Well, I want to work on this part of the.
- 33:03This is the one I'm interested in and it brings up.
- 33:05The MCP app and off goes a sub agent to do it.
- 33:07We could do that, but I think the second you have to type in
- 33:10this is the line up like yeah. That doesn't make sense.
- 33:11We set the. Quiet part too loud, right?
- 33:13Like that was the that was the hard thing.
- 33:14We don't need the app after that.
- 33:16So that's why I think there's probably like a first party
- 33:18solution that has to happen for your exact use case.
- 33:21OK, well that's one. Tell me about this.
- 33:23And this next one is a lot of times I want certain things that
- 33:29are just like you get the answer back and you want to be able to
- 33:34like you said, render certain components differently.
- 33:38It's like I've got a table now or and really what I need is a
- 33:43form or I've got this and so the components you want a hot swap
- 33:47so. If you have this generative UI
- 33:50set up, then 100% that's what it's for.
- 33:53So you're, you're, you're asking about the data.
- 33:55It takes a guess. It's like, here's a table,
- 33:57here's this other thing. And you're like, you know, the
- 33:59table's not the way to do it. I what I really need is a
- 34:01summary and a histogram and whatever.
- 34:04And now it it can go back and say oh OK, and deliver you that
- 34:08UI that you wanted. But what I think about is a lot
- 34:11of the clicking around. And so first of all, that's
- 34:14awesome that it can do that. But then the next step in my
- 34:17mind is I don't want to have to use words to explain isolate
- 34:21this table. I want to click on the table and
- 34:24then like get a drop down much like you know so.
- 34:27That is possible, but we haven't done yet all.
- 34:29Right, so. It's coming.
- 34:31It's I'm sure it's coming. This is the sort of thing it's
- 34:34actually a great call out because I don't think I said it
- 34:36clearly a moment ago. I everything that I said, one
- 34:40could interpret it as like we build the UI, we take a static
- 34:43picture of it and we return it to you.
- 34:45That was. That was my understanding so.
- 34:47So it's a good thing we're exploring.
- 34:48It's not that what we're. Returning is a full React
- 34:51application that is fully interactive.
- 34:54We shad C enter under the components.
- 34:56So theming like everything that people think about when they
- 34:58think about AUI we are replicating.
- 35:00It's just we just pre built a lot of the components so that
- 35:04it's not for people who want to build fully custom front end
- 35:07it's. Different than the playground
- 35:09skill because the playground skill is just HTML.
- 35:11Exactly this is your composing pre-existing.
- 35:13We've we've over 100 components. It's a very big library.
- 35:16Pretty much anything you could want to do is in there, buttons
- 35:19and and and cards and metrics and statistics and sliders and
- 35:24like anything you want. But it is all interactive.
- 35:27So while at this moment we don't have a drill down, when you
- 35:32click one of the charts, we absolutely could add it.
- 35:35But what the charts will do is you mouse over, you mouse over
- 35:38one of the bars in a bar chart, you'll get a tool tip that tells
- 35:40you what it is. You can click it when you're
- 35:42liking at a table, you can click a row, you can use an on select
- 35:46call back to now load detail of that row.
- 35:49You can drill into it. So the specifics that you're
- 35:52asking about, no, today that library doesn't have them, but
- 35:55in the near future, absolutely. It there's nothing stopping it
- 35:58except time and bandwidth and interest.
- 36:00Yeah, OK. It's super cool.
- 36:02Yeah. So this, I'm actually glad you
- 36:03asked. This is a super important point.
- 36:05We are building fully interactive applications, proper
- 36:08MTB applications that a person could have written in a
- 36:13different ecosystem than Python. And there are some people for
- 36:16whom this is blasphemous. I think even that's like the tag
- 36:19line of this whole thing is it's, it's kind of crazy.
- 36:22But one of the reasons that I'm excited about it is no matter
- 36:24where you look in the generative UI space, and there's a lot of
- 36:28attention right now on how do we get this right?
- 36:30One of the biggest problems to solve is people don't want to
- 36:34write HTML and JavaScript and CSS out of their agent as the
- 36:38playground skill does for a very simple reason.
- 36:40Not that it does a bad job, it's just a lot of tokens.
- 36:42So what we're looking for, right, we're, we're looking for
- 36:46really token efficient ways to represent UIS so that agents can
- 36:50generate UIS cheaply and quickly.
- 36:53And there's one other constraint, which is we want
- 36:55them to be able to stream the UI.
- 36:58When you write HTML, it's challenging to stream because
- 37:01you have to close your tags and all kinds of things you can do
- 37:03to like auto heal and stuff. But in many cases you until you
- 37:07close A tag, you can't see it. And so you end up not actually
- 37:10seeing your UI until it's the. Wrong tool for the job.
- 37:12It's the. Wrong tool for the job.
- 37:14The craziest thing that I might say after all the crazy things
- 37:17I've said so far is that Python satisfies all of the
- 37:20requirements of a token efficient streamable DSL for
- 37:24declaring your UI. And so we can in three lines of
- 37:29in three lines of Python. I can say I want to CSS grid, I
- 37:31want a pie chart, and I want a data Table 3 lines.
- 37:35And that's exactly what I get. A full interactive application
- 37:39with all of the backing HTML and JavaScript that that would
- 37:41require to stream over it in three lines of code and they
- 37:44stream. And so this is a very weird
- 37:47thing that I'm talking about. If I heard myself talking about
- 37:50this, you know, two years ago, I would think this is insane.
- 37:53Well, it's a bit of a plot twist.
- 37:55It absolutely. Token efficiency with MCP goes
- 37:58against every narrative out there right now.
- 38:01Doesn't it? And that's because of bad
- 38:02clients, yeah. Getting back to our first point,
- 38:05just to. Drive the dagger a little bit
- 38:07just to twist it a little bit more.
- 38:08That's bad clients. Those are clients that didn't
- 38:11really think. One of the ways that we talk
- 38:12about this sometimes is sometimes when you're working in
- 38:14MCP, it feels like you're punished for the protocol
- 38:16success, right? My, my most popular talk from
- 38:20last year was called your MCP server is bad.
- 38:23And you should feel bad because people would put 50 tools on the
- 38:26server and I'd be like, well, that's a bad server.
- 38:28You should only have 25. The agents can't handle it.
- 38:30That's a really lousy message. Like when you really think about
- 38:33it, I'm saying to people like, no, no, no, don't.
- 38:35Don't use all of MCP, Yeah. Yeah, just use.
- 38:37A little bit in your. Lane, don't, don't.
- 38:39And and that's that's not fun. I don't want to be up there
- 38:42saying your server is bad because you wrote too much code.
- 38:45Like what a crazy thing to say. And now that we have a
- 38:48generation of clients, clawed VS Code Goose, just to name a few
- 38:53that are innovating in the space and they're not downloading
- 38:56every tool and they're and they're really being more
- 38:59intelligent about how they manage tokens.
- 39:01Now all of a sudden you can go build a server with 1000 tools
- 39:04and not blink. It will work.
- 39:06So let's talk about Open Claw and the fun that you had with it
- 39:10over the last 24 hours. I came to New York, to the Dev
- 39:14Summit to give a talk and I had been working and working and
- 39:16working on my slides and I got here to the hotel and I opened
- 39:20my computer and my open claw had decided in its in its exuberance
- 39:23to help and. It's infinite wisdom in it's.
- 39:25Infinite wisdom. It had decided to delete all of
- 39:27my slides and replace them with a draft it found from about a
- 39:31week ago. And I, I had a funeral to attend
- 39:36last night, the NTP funeral and, and I didn't have time to deal
- 39:42with this and it was very frustrating and why?
- 39:44Did it do it? Was there any prompt or was
- 39:46there any you were letting it run I, I.
- 39:49Figured out why it did and it's it's it's stupid, it's tough I
- 39:53deleted a slide and some about six months ago I stopped using
- 39:58like slide software. I now have my agents build my
- 40:01slides because I get my speaker notes the way I want them and
- 40:03formatted for me and it works great in.
- 40:04MCP apps and. They're MCP and soon they will
- 40:07be in MCP app, but I have a library for it.
- 40:10Nice and. And so I, I'm at the mercy of an
- 40:13agent, therefore, to edit the HTML and like build my deck and
- 40:16build my speaker notes. And I had to delete a slide.
- 40:19And in its infinite wisdom, it did not delete the corresponding
- 40:22speaker note. And so I noticed as I was on the
- 40:25train coming into the city, I noticed that my speaker notes
- 40:28were one slide ahead of my slides.
- 40:30I was like, that's weird. I, I didn't think of how it had
- 40:33happened. I've reconstructed this.
- 40:34And so I said to it, I was like, hey, the speaker notes are not
- 40:37aligned. Can you just, you know, jog them
- 40:38back, just get them back aligned.
- 40:40I think at that moment it did one of those context compaction.
- 40:43Oh. No.
- 40:44And so when it woke up, it heard that I wanted the things
- 40:47aligned, but somehow miss the critical fact that we've spent
- 40:50the last, you know, three days together working on these
- 40:52slides. And so the message that I got
- 40:54was, hey, something was wrong with your speaker notes in this
- 40:58draft. But don't worry, I found another
- 41:00draft where they were lined up and it just swapped.
- 41:02Them threw it. Away and I don't know, is this
- 41:06one of those moments where like if I were my parents, I'd be
- 41:08like, well, where's your backup? Like why didn't you have?
- 41:10Your backup or at least some version control Some.
- 41:12Version control but the last commit was like two days like
- 41:15who knows it? Was back when that last draft
- 41:17was, yeah, exactly what it was just rolling back so.
- 41:20So thank God, somehow I convinced it to like, dig
- 41:23through its own history and go find it.
- 41:25But there was a moment of panic last night where I was like, I
- 41:27want to announce this new crazy library and it's got to be good.
- 41:31And I got to give a good talk. And my slides are are in the
- 41:35your monster. Deleted something dude.
- 41:37I was you were I? Was, and so I actually, I, I got
- 41:39really mad at my open claw and I, I put him aside for a second
- 41:42and I, I worked with Claude code to finish the slides in the
- 41:44morning. It was like, it was like a, a
- 41:46weirdly personal feeling I had. I was like, you're in a timeout.
- 41:49It was like with my kids, like you're in a timeout.
- 41:51I want to talk to you for a little.
- 41:52Bit mission critical right now. You step up, don't.
- 41:54And I'm like. Don't screw up like the other
- 41:55agent and and it did a great job.
- 41:58Wow, so I did have some fun with open claw so.
- 42:00Now, but I do. Love open claw but it bothered
- 42:03me last night 1. Thing that I keep saying with
- 42:06open claw is that and the reason that I'm not using it is because
- 42:11a friend of mine talked about how he's sent a lot of invites
- 42:17to people just to try and fish who's using open claw and on the
- 42:21invite it's white on white text in the description with a prompt
- 42:24injection and then well, it's just to like return, you know
- 42:29XYZ. He's not actually doing anything
- 42:31malicious. It's just to see who's using
- 42:33open claw and who can I just like get information from here
- 42:37that's so. Interesting.
- 42:38Because now you've got all these new vectors that especially if
- 42:41you're giving it access to your e-mail, to your calendar, to all
- 42:45these places that you're Slack, you can theoretically get prompt
- 42:51injection injected from all of these places.
- 42:54Yeah. You, you absolutely can.
- 42:55And so this is, this is one of the reasons that I was really
- 42:57hesitant at 1st and then dove in fully when I built workflows
- 43:03where it's not my open claw impersonating me.
- 43:06It's my open claw with its own identity on its own box in its
- 43:10own slack, with its own, you know, e-mail and everything.
- 43:15And I, it only knows what I send it.
- 43:18And so I use it primarily for two things.
- 43:20I use it primarily. It's like a knowledge
- 43:22collection. I use its memory feature
- 43:24basically. So it's kind of up to date on
- 43:26all the things I'm working on. And it becomes a brainstorming
- 43:29partner and a thought partner for strategic matters.
- 43:32And then am I supposed to put out a blog post tomorrow?
- 43:35Oh, I am like, let's go bring up the draft and work out, you
- 43:37know, that kind of stuff. But where I've really been using
- 43:41it is every company on the planet seems to pitch me
- 43:45productivity software at work. Nobody wants to give me
- 43:49productivity software at home. I have 4 kids.
- 43:52My wife and I both work full time.
- 43:54We have a lot going on at home. Managing the school calendar is
- 43:59hard. And so this is one of those
- 44:02places where the the the bot has a calendar that is our family
- 44:06calendar that it's allowed to manage to write to.
- 44:08And then my wife and I both subscribe to it from its, you
- 44:12know, Apple account and I can send it.
- 44:15One of my son's schools sent the school calendar as an image,
- 44:19which I think someone probably spent a lot of time making.
- 44:22It was a real pain to now go enter into my calendar.
- 44:24And so I forwarded it the image and I was like, put this in the
- 44:27calendar. And two seconds later, all of a
- 44:29sudden, all of the days off and all of the practices and
- 44:31whatever, they all start showing up in the calendar.
- 44:33And I think that's when my wife became convinced that there's
- 44:36something here that we can actually use this to help us
- 44:39automate. Stuff got famous for using open
- 44:42claw to help with their and it's a it's a mom.
- 44:46Things like open claw mom or something I see.
- 44:48I missed my calling. Because I'm.
- 44:49Using it at home all the time you could.
- 44:51Have been there. I am.
- 44:52Talking fast, MCP. When I when this is actually the
- 44:55thing that I'm, it could. Have been an influencer I'm.
- 44:57Really, I'm really excited about this.
- 44:59Like it's really, it's really become part of our homework flow
- 45:02well. That feels like a lot of time
- 45:05saved. It, it, it does now there are
- 45:08places where it feels like it adds right, like just just
- 45:10because it gets things wrong or it deletes your slides or, or
- 45:13whatever it is. But by and large, I think if you
- 45:15can find these moments, and I think taking an image and
- 45:20putting on your calendar is a great example of that, right?
- 45:23Because we have 4 kids, keeping track of like what food we have
- 45:26in the house is more complicated than it might be in most
- 45:30families. Like, do we need milk?
- 45:32It's a really important question in my house for young kids,
- 45:34right? So being able to have it just
- 45:38know what our usual grocery order is so that if I tell it
- 45:41like, hey, we're, we're low on milk or we're low on frozen
- 45:44waffles or, or whatever it is. And it's just, it's better than
- 45:47that sticky note that we used to use that's hidden in a drawer
- 45:50that I don't know when the milk was written.
- 45:52I don't know when that, you know, it just can accumulate
- 45:55this kind of information so that when it's time to go grocery
- 45:58shopping, I'm like, what's, what's the list?
- 45:59What do I? Need to get what are we?
- 46:00Low on. So those are the kinds of little
- 46:02frictions where I'm finding these things to be incredible
- 46:06and safe because it's within my talk about in the four walls of
- 46:12a company, it's in the four walls of my house and it's
- 46:15keeping track of that stuff. We had a project the other day,
- 46:17we recently moved and I needed to go like register warranties
- 46:20on a bunch of appliances, which I'm not excited about.
- 46:23So I took a camera and I wandered around and each one it
- 46:25like it took all the notes on it, it parse the serial number
- 46:28and all this stuff, you know, the serial numbers under the
- 46:31dishwasher. I can barely see it.
- 46:32So I snap a photo of it and it took care of the rest.
- 46:35And so it's just like these, these are the kinds of things
- 46:37that I've found really useful. Whereas in a in a professional
- 46:41setting is 40 different SAS vendors.
- 46:43I'm sure SAS is dead and open call personal, but but it's not.
- 46:46There are people doing really amazing work to help us with
- 46:48productivity. At home, not so much.
- 46:50Yeah. Why do you think nobody wants to
- 46:53go after that market? I mean.
- 46:56It's just hard to be to see. I think it's hard.
- 46:59Like I don't, I don't know that I have an insightful answer.
- 47:01I think it's hard. I think it's hard to get people
- 47:03to pay for that. I think it's hard to guess what
- 47:06families need. Like my?
- 47:09Work flows are probably very different than your work flows,
- 47:11even if we both would find value in a family setting.
- 47:13Yeah, the. Grocery store is is a much
- 47:15different workflow, but I guess that flexibility is what the
- 47:18open claws are. I think so.
- 47:20Very valuable, I think. So, and that's, you know, so
- 47:22where, where I'd like to take this very weird example of the
- 47:25groceries is I'd like to get to a point where it does what I do.
- 47:29It's just, I open the fridge and I'm like, oh, I expect to see,
- 47:32you know, 4 cartoons of milk here and I only see one.
- 47:34We're low on milk and. Well, I was thinking that you
- 47:38were using something like picnic or I don't in Europe we have
- 47:42like just eat take away and they'll order your or Uber Eats,
- 47:47whatever, like Amazon, Whole Foods.
- 47:49Yeah, like a dinner and just deliver your we'll.
- 47:52We'll sometimes get, we'll get the groceries delivered
- 47:54sometimes usually just for convenience.
- 47:57But placing the order, and again, maybe it's just because I
- 47:59have a large family. So like the exercise of actually
- 48:01placing the order is a lot of clicks, a lot of thinking, a lot
- 48:06of, but you can. Have open claw do that right?
- 48:08But now we can. Have open claw do it, although I
- 48:09haven't quite. I have not quite made the leap
- 48:12yet to letting it. Pay for them, pay for things.
- 48:15The way that my buddy showed me. He gave me a demo on him doing
- 48:18exactly this and it does everything.
- 48:21It puts it all into the basket. But when you have to pay, you
- 48:24go. So I would do that I.
- 48:28I guess I don't have a good like reason why I haven't done that.
- 48:30It's just I haven't done that yet.
- 48:31But I think that's the that's the right process.
- 48:33Like, hey, here's here's what I think you need.
- 48:36My my, I think my deep fear is like you get to that point.
- 48:38It's like it's like getting your slides deleted.
- 48:40It's like, here's what I think you need.
- 48:41It's just totally wrong. 21 Now I got to go do it myself. 20
- 48:44rolls of toilet paper. Exactly all I got you exactly.
- 48:47It's the only thing. You're trolling me.
- 48:49It is not COVID anymore. I do not one.
- 48:51Carton of milk, yeah. Well, but that would be it feels
- 48:56like that's an easy like at least to experiment, try it, see
- 49:01if it works and. That's, that's what I've, that's
- 49:03what I've been like. I, I had an, I had an off site 2
- 49:05weeks ago and I was sort of being obnoxious and pitching my
- 49:09open claw to all these folks I was with.
- 49:11It was a YPO thing and we used it.
- 49:14We, we, we were all at different events and different dinners and
- 49:18different bars and whatever and a lot of receipts and we, we try
- 49:20our best to share all the expenses, but it's, it's
- 49:23annoying to like go through. And so I was like, wait a
- 49:25second, let me, let me see the receipts.
- 49:27And the receipts had jotted down, you know, who is at which
- 49:29dinner and whatever, trying to, trying to be fair.
- 49:31And so I just took a picture of all and I gave it to the open
- 49:32call and I was like, work this out.
- 49:34Like, you know who's here? Because it knew about the
- 49:37invite. I was like, you know who's here?
- 49:38Just like read the handwritten scroll on the receipt, look at
- 49:42the totals, just figure out who owes who what.
- 49:44So this can be easy. And it's, you know, I don't know
- 49:46how much time it's saved, but it felt magical in the moment.
- 49:49And it was like, what if this were a more automatic process?
- 49:53What if this was more in integrated in my life?
- 49:55What? I was asking people last night
- 49:58when they were telling me about what they run open claw with and
- 50:01I was like but why do you need open claw for that?
- 50:03Why can't I just do that? What you said with Claude or Co
- 50:07worker or Claude code or whatever.
- 50:10I I I wonder this all the time. This morning I wondered why am I
- 50:14using open? Claw for slides when it can
- 50:16delete I. Think, I think there's a good
- 50:17answer though, and I don't think it's unique to open claw, but it
- 50:21has been unique to open claw and things like open claw until
- 50:24recently, which is the first use case I mentioned, which is that
- 50:28it accumulates its knowledge over time in a way that is like
- 50:31categorically different than a lot of the SAS based agents.
- 50:35My, my open clause memory system is really tuned to the way I
- 50:41work, the way it writes down things.
- 50:43I actually have another agent that monitors my main agent and
- 50:46takes behavioral notes on it so that it will, it's a longer
- 50:49story, but it's a it's my nanny. Basically, it looks after the
- 50:52other one. And if I'm not getting good
- 50:54results, it heard all about the slides this morning.
- 50:56It actually writes new behavioral notes for that.
- 50:58One that will. Affect it in in new sessions.
- 51:01That type of really rich note taking the notes and the
- 51:06memories that my bots have collected are massive, like
- 51:10sprawling amounts of information that are searchable and stuff.
- 51:13And I think that is the number one reason to have one of these
- 51:16bots is that you are totally flexibly customizing its access
- 51:20to its own information. For me, that's the killer
- 51:23feature beyond all the files, you know, CL is and all the
- 51:27things it can do on the Mac mini it's running on like sure,
- 51:30great, that's great. But it's, it's access to its own
- 51:32brain basically that it can self improve.
- 51:35That's amazing to me. I think I have an opinion that
- 51:38most people here at the conference don't share, which is
- 51:40based on experience. And I'm pretty confident it's
- 51:43right. OK.
- 51:44Tell me more I'm. I'm really excited about this.
- 51:46So conferences are important. We all have going to
- 51:48conferences. Here we are.
- 51:49I think conferences are better when there's not a vendor
- 51:52pressure and you're not being sold something.
- 51:54But I also think it takes vendors and sponsors to put on a
- 51:56good conference. As a conference runner myself,
- 51:59it is very hard to do them without people sponsoring.
- 52:02Exactly. And so that's a healthy tension.
- 52:06And so we decided to try to create a intimate builders
- 52:12conference within this intersection of our Python And
- 52:15our AI worlds. And we did this in partnership
- 52:17with the team at Pydantic Conference 2 weeks ago called Pi
- 52:20AI, which I think was a huge success, partially because we
- 52:24didn't try to sell anybody anything.
- 52:26And we, we sponsored it. We didn't make that a, a secret.
- 52:30We, we presented it. I think we also did it with the
- 52:32team over at Theory Ventures, who are great partners to us.
- 52:36And we were able to just bring together this amazing who's who
- 52:40in the Python And AI community to just talk about the cool
- 52:44things they're doing and talk about them at an intersection of
- 52:49I'm doing AI and I'm using Python.
- 52:51Those are the only two requirements that we put out
- 52:54there and it was just a really fun day at the Ferry Building in
- 52:57San Francisco. I am now convinced it is the
- 53:00first of many we will do. And we're we've been trying to
- 53:02have little mini meetups and and stuff like that.
- 53:04But this is sort of a, a crown jewel thing that we want to
- 53:08curate each year. I think it's going to be super
- 53:11exciting. It's just yearly, not quarterly.
- 53:15The big one is yearly yes. I'm getting a nod yes because
- 53:19I'd love it to be more, but I'm trying.
- 53:20To push that. Yearly I would say all I'm
- 53:23allowed to say. Is bigger team, so the.
- 53:25The, the big one is yearly and then we'll have these sort of
- 53:28localized meetups. We did one in DC, we did one in
- 53:31London, we did one in San Francisco, we did one in New
- 53:32York. And so it's been fun.
- 53:34And like, I think going back to conferences and, and, and as you
- 53:38know, of course, like getting in front of people and getting to
- 53:41meet people is an amazing thing. I think yearly is good because I
- 53:45don't know, I don't know if we can pull off more, but we get
- 53:48this one spot on the calendar where we're going to bring
- 53:50together one specific community and give them in a good excuse
- 53:53to interact and have some good food and have some good talks.
- 53:56And personally, I'm really excited that we're getting the
- 53:58chance to to do this. It's not in my skill set.
- 54:00So fortunately I have an amazing team that has actually figured
- 54:02out how to put on a great conference.
- 54:05And that's been really fun to to contribute to like the ecosystem
- 54:08of. Is it paid?
- 54:09It is paid, it is paid. We do stream everything online
- 54:14so that the information is available to everyone, but it's
- 54:17a paid conference to join in the in the moment.
- 54:18And it's A and it's a small conference, very intentional.
- 54:20Yeah. I like that better because you
- 54:23have people that are much more engaged and committed, yes.
- 54:27We for this one, we got in a weird situation where frankly,
- 54:30we weren't sure that we were going to sell it out.
- 54:33We got to a point where we sold out early and we actually had to
- 54:36like create the list. We had to make sure that you
- 54:39were actually a builder in the space, that you were not a
- 54:42salesperson, that you're like it.
- 54:45It got a little contentious at times, as a matter of fact,
- 54:47about who was going to come because you want to do it just
- 54:50you bought a ticket, what kind of thing, And it actually just
- 54:52had to be for builders only. So there's a little slew thing
- 54:55involved. Awesome.
- 54:56Well, yeah, I'm excited for the next one.
- 54:58Yeah. Keep us posted on when it is so
- 55:00we can if we're not there, we can stream it and that would be
- 55:04involved. Will it be?
- 55:04Next year. Awesome.