Category: Daily Report

It’s been a few days since I posted last. I’m going to let myself off, but resolve to do better in the future – since I do want to keep posting on a daily basis but I am aware I want to make the posts more valuable; so I feel they represent value that can then go onto LinkedIn, and the other social networks.

Things are definitely building in my mind; and projects are coming along. However, still a long way from anything concrete taking off.

For the moment would just like to talk about MCP, because it really is a very significant milestone in the AI world. (Image context from OpenAI was another one recently).

MCP

Model Context Protocol was announced in Nov 2024 by Anthropic.

This is a big step forward since it has standardised how language models can/should interact with external tools.

In order for LLMs to be further useful, they need to be able to action things.

I’m guessing that once Anthropic had integrated a couple of tools with their LLMs they realised it would be better to have a standard way of doing that … and from that they came up with the MCP architecture.

At first understanding, giving a language model a standard way of interfacing with the outside world is a bit of a game-changer and there are already a ton of integrations that we can use straight away. Things are happening really fast.

Core Architecture

Essentially, you have an application (called the Host), and this has a Client inside it.

The Client maintains connection to the Servers which have access to the tools you want the LLMs to connect to.

Protocol Layer

It’s fairly simple … you have:

• Requests
• Notifications
• Results

You have functions that:

• Handle incoming requests
• Send requests and await response
• Handle income notification
• Send a notification

Transport Layer

All transport layers use JSONRPC

JSON-RPC Request Object

• jsonrpc : always going to be “2.0”
• method
• params (optional)
• id

Without an ID, it is considered a notification that doesnt expect a response. In fact, servers MUST NOT reply to a notification.

JSON-RPC Response Object

• jsonrpc (version string)
• result
• error
• id

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To be clear, MCP is a standard way – a proposed specification that multiple parties can agree on – for how language models will interact with outside tools.

Protocols are vital in tech. We have TCP-IP and email, which you use all the time. Without that agreement, we could have had an incredibly fractured internet.

When companies and developers can agree to do things in a certain way, it makes it easier to make systems.

Using MCP I assume is very much like working with interfaces. If you code an LLM up to work with your own tools and then for whatever reason you decide to switch LLMs … then using a protocol would mean there’s no lost work – because the new one will use exactly the same interface as the current one.

Reference

4 Request object

A rpc call is represented by sending a Request object to a Server. The Request object has the following members:jsonrpcA String specifying the version of the JSON-RPC protocol. MUST be exactly “2.0”.methodA String containing the name of the method to be invoked. Method names that begin with the word rpc followed by a period character (U+002E or ASCII 46) are reserved for rpc-internal methods and extensions and MUST NOT be used for anything else.paramsA Structured value that holds the parameter values to be used during the invocation of the method. This member MAY be omitted.idAn identifier established by the Client that MUST contain a String, Number, or NULL value if included. If it is not included it is assumed to be a notification. The value SHOULD normally not be Null [1] and Numbers SHOULD NOT contain fractional parts [2]

The Server MUST reply with the same value in the Response object if included. This member is used to correlate the context between the two objects.

[1] The use of Null as a value for the id member in a Request object is discouraged, because this specification uses a value of Null for Responses with an unknown id. Also, because JSON-RPC 1.0 uses an id value of Null for Notifications this could cause confusion in handling.

[2] Fractional parts may be problematic, since many decimal fractions cannot be represented exactly as binary fractions.

Strong results come from doing the right thing many times over.

Consistency. Discipline.

I’ve got multiple projects going on at the moment and they can easily fill up my days entirely, without time for the things that will necessarily continue to build the business. But I am dropping things that will actually continue to build the business.

These are a good additional starting point to my existing habits:

• Grant and funding research & application
• Event, conference and networking research
• Email marketing pipeline
• Website marketing
• Social media marketing

It’s a bit like programming yourself for succeeding; you decide what actions the business would benefit from; or what areas need to be attended to consistently.

These become the KPIs of your business.

I think the way the world is right now, people need to feel like there is a new wave of ‘something good’ … and whilst AI is certainly going to take many jobs, it opens up a whole world of possibility for those who are prepared to learn about it, work hard and creatively use it. So there has been this huge positive wave of energy (certainly amped up with money) toward innovation. It may well be that LLMs have limitations, and that we are witnessing a bubble… but people are now TRYING new things. Technical and non-technical people are finding they can do a whole lot more using AI. What I mean is, a lot of crazy ideas are being unlocked. Pandora’s box has been opened.

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True Personal Assistants

For me, it gives me the opportunity to build a personal assistant of the magnitude that i’ve wanted to few decades. I think the science fiction movies and video games influenced me in wanting to build these personal assistants.

Examples are

JARVIS Assistant From Iron Man Movies

J.A.R.V.I.S., which stands for “Just A Rather Very Intelligent System,” is Tony Stark’s natural-language user interface computer system, named after Edwin Jarvis, the butler who worked for Howard Stark and the Stark household.18 Initially, J.A.R.V.I.S. was developed as a simple AI assistant to control Stark’s Iron Man suit, but it evolved into a powerful AI capable of managing various tasks and assisting Stark in his personal and superhero life.51 J.A.R.V.I.S. uses advanced natural language processing and communication skills to understand and respond to Stark’s commands, making it more than just an AI tool—it’s a trusted companion.

So, the ‘trusted companion’ thing here is the key.

Cortana from Halo

As an artificial construct, Cortana has no physical form or being. Cortana speaks with a smooth female voice, and projects a holographic image of herself as a woman. Cortana is said to resemble Halsey, with a similar attitude “unchecked by military and social protocol”. In Halo: The Fall of Reach, Cortana is described as slender, with close-cropped hair and a skin hue that varies from navy blue to lavender, depending on her mood.^[6]: 216 Numbers and symbols flash across her form when she is thinking.^[9] Halsey sees Cortana as a teenage version of herself: smarter than her parents, always “talking, learning, and eager to share her knowledge”.^[6]: 218 Cortana is described as having a sardonic sense of humor^[10] and often cracks jokes or wryly comments, even during combat.^[6]: 217

There’s a few more but that’s enough for now

So, the key components are:

• LLMs (Language Models)
• Decision Trees
• GenerativeUI
• Automation flows
• Data Mining & Analysis
• Context and Object Oriented Memory
• MCP

In the future I imagine, the internet has pretty much been abstracted from us. Which isn’t a great thought for most of us, but it’s kind of a natural progression. Things change, for instance it was naive of me to think that I could have another 20 years of making money doing the same thing until I retire i.e programming.

At school, I had a maths teacher who used to program in assembly. Talk about talent… in a few decades will we have any humans that know how to write in assembly? I always wondered why he didn’t still program, and it was probably because he didn’t move on.

In the same way, those of us who understand HTML/CSS/JS on a deep level … these skills are fast becoming abstracted away with vibe coding apps. The vibe coding apps that combine with Supabase are going to get better and better; but will the prediction machine ever get so good that it can really understand programming so that it makes it super clean (probably yes, as our prompt engineering gets better to help it). Eventually, the personal assistants will replace any requirements that vibe coding creates now.

The next big waves/industries to come along will be more widespread autonomous machines (drones, robots, cars), surveillance and wide scale sentiment monitoring; then beyond it some sort of biohacking industry specifically with longevity at the core; video games will have a resurgence in originality; so I do hope that something will replace the employment drop-off that will shortly happen.

That’s enough thoughts for today.

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Work Updates:

• I continue to work on a side project to bring in a small amount of money but enough to cover personal costs. It’s a fun, high potential project, and made me realise I do like working on IT dev projects, and am quickly improving at the management of them.
• The DXP project is slowly getting to the beta launch was is great. Once that’s hit, I will share more details.
• My own platform is coming along. Shown it to a few people and I know these people wouldn’t sugarcoat stuff, it’s super days but reasonably positive. Just got to keep going.
• The ideas that would drive an AI Agency are coming together; but still a little way off from doing that
• Continually trying to keep up with the industry
• More and more aware of the necessity of marketing for everything

So, the new era of the internet is going to be connecting the dots. In this paradigm, the dots are the ecosystems that already exist and have many users.

These ecosystems have had millions of dollars poured into them. They have somewhat of a technical moat now but their user ecosystem widens that moat most of all.

For instance, I have been meaning to get started on N8N for a few weeks now. I’m glad I sat down and made time for it today … this is a brand new software type available to people without having to pay for the upfront development of handling the communication between the dots.

As a starting point I setup a workflow that grabbed my favourite Arsenal FC blog, asked OpenAI to summarise it, and then message me them on slack.

After some fiddling around I got some messages in Slack!

I can’t overemphasise how great this is. This is a huge timesaver, but it’s yet again another threat to programmers.

Vibe coding is really taking over. Simply put, non-technical people with ideas can now use AI to make very high quality prototypes.

Those prototypes can do most of the things that are needed for a company. However, in almost all cases, the code generated to run them is somewhat bad (from a software engineer process) … and if you keep going down that route without regular refactoring and tidying up, eventually you will get technical debt.

That technical debt may come three years down the road though, at which point you will have to hire an experienced programmer. If you are still going in three years though you are likely to have money by that point and can afford the programmer. So that’s the payoff!

After talking about protecting my time yesterday; I went and spent an entire day talking to people today.

Was it productive?

When focused on building stuff everyday, you need to balance it out with social contact. It’s good to laugh, to share ideas, and to get other peoples’ perspectives on life and AI. It’s good to get away from the screens that suck our lifetime away without us noticing.

There is a network effect to it as well. You talk to one person, make a positive impression. Maybe something that they are looking for you, you can help with… or you link them to someone you know. Or vice-versa. You never know what the ripples of action will touch in reality.

That’s all for today.

Tomorrow back to action getting stuff done …

To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.

Whilst I’ve known this for a while, it’s been more apparent in this startup attempt, of the importance of protecting your time.

The unfortunate truth is that all of us have less time in life than we would like to. You never really know when your time is going to be up and most of us project our consciousness into the future, never really taking stock of the life we literally are right now.

Whilst I do get occasionally stressed and frustrated at work, I do genuinely enjoy doing what I do. I always have. Maybe I would enjoy other engineering careers, but internet & software is where I put the last 30 years of my life so there is a lot of sunk cost bias.

I also genuinely enjoy being self-employed and having my freedom of choice to make decisions (even those that lead to mistakes) and life freedom in general (as opposed to a nine to five). I certainly could have had an easier and more profitable life so far if I had taken the employee route but then I wouldn’t have had all the life experiences i’ve had.

The point is, when you are doing something that you enjoy, by default your time is reasonably well invested. If you are on the right path for you, then regardless of how inefficient or ineffective you are, fundamentally you are still making good use of your time.

It’s when you really don’t like what you’re doing, or where you are going to work in the morning hating the prospect, that you are wasting time.

And fortunately, right now, I am on the right path for me. So that means at least at the base level my time is being invested in the right area.

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However, for the days 50 to 100, I want to up my game considerably. This doesn’t mean running around in circles faster … it means:

• doing less (paradoxically)
• doing more (paradoxically)
• automation

Doing Less By Saying No

There is one rule here. It is about saying NO with wisdom. Saying NO to the unimportant is the one thing that I want to implement. Whether thats a phone call, a meeting, a project idea, attempting to nurture a friendship, a task, social media, etc. Saying no to an unwarranted impulse to check email or social. But for me especially as someone who can generate a new idea every hour, it’s about saying no to those and staying focused on what I need to get built.

Doing More By Focusing On Key Areas

The rule here is to systemise. I hope eventually to be in the position to build a team, but in reality it’s about optimising myself first. Having said no to the non-important by doing less, you do more by consistently focusing on key areas. As an example, LinkedIn is a key area. I’ve dabbled in it for the last 50 days for the first time taking it somewhat seriously, but I also know that I am not optimising each post to deliver value to others. So that has to change.

Well Thought Out Automation

More on this another day…

Apart from a two hour call covering some booking system improvements; I took the weekend off. Mothers day on Sunday as well so bit of a BBQ and kicking a football about the park.