Transcription
I've officially stopped using MCPs. And in this video, I'm going to try and explain why and why you should consider doing this thing.
Now, MCPs, when they first came out, everyone was completely obsessed with them. They were all the rage. Everyone used them. Everyone still uses them today. But what I've slowly been realizing is an MCP is not really actually for us. It's actually for an AI system, right? So if you have a specific system like an AI agent that requires an MCP in order to function, then it's different. But what I've been slowly realizing is that actually having a CLI terminal setup with local running code is actually much better. So in this video I'm going to try and explain why.
Now recently I've been adding a lot of this content to the school community. So, inside the beginner vibe coding concepts course and inside reading number five, you can see I've added this update where basically I'm saying you don't need an MCP for absolutely everything. The only MCPS I actually recommend that you use now are MCPs that can control something that's too complex for you to understand. So, for example, if you don't actually understand what the hell is going on with code and you're just getting started and you don't even know what a database is or how to run code or anything, then maybe MCPs are your friend. But if you do have some idea of what's going on, I personally wouldn't use them. The only reason to use an MCP is to change how clawed code operates or to add something that is missing. So, for example, you could use the sequential thinking MCP, some kind of context engineering MCP, or something like the Playright MCP to add functionality to claude code that doesn't exist at the moment.
If you want to join the AI automation school, I will leave a link to it in the description of this video and also in the pinned comment. It helps me be able to focus on what's important, which is building things and experimenting. And also, if you just need a little bit more help with AI coding, vibe coding, and all of that stuff, there's no better place to get started than the my AO AI automation school.
Then, just on a completely random aside, someone asked for an update on the group Iron Man on Old School Runescape. This is the current status of the account. Interestingly enough, we actually managed to get the main boss of one of the first raids down. Um, so we're we're basically just going to be trying to do more of that. I'm currently just grinding 65 herb, doing farm runs, all that good stuff so that we can continue raiding. If you do want to follow along with that progress, we will be uploading videos to this channel at some point, Daviescape OSRS. I will also leave a link to this in the description if you guys want to go and subscribe. Help me get monetized on that channel. I literally just need 300 subscribers and I can moni monetize this channel. At the moment, it's just guides and things of things that I've been working on recently. But very, very soon, I will be also doing progress videos of these accounts that we're currently working on.
So, with all that being said, let's look into what I actually want to talk about in today's video, which is MCPs and why I stopped using them. Now, I'm going to show you this in a very simple way. So, I'm going to say Claude here. And this is something I wish I had done from the beginning of Grove SEO Grove, which is the SAS that I've recently created because now it's all a bit of a mess. And I just wish I had done a bit more of this stuff at the very beginning.
So, what I'm going to do here is say set me up a dev instance with Docker using a locally running Superbase instance as the database. Then, set up the Superbase CLI. So, you can call commands yourself to control the database. And then I'll just say and also give me a basic HTML CSS JavaScript to display the database data which we'll add after. Okay, I probably shouldn't have done that now, but that's fine. Whatever. So, we'll let this run and basically what it's going to do is it's going to create an entire system for me.
So, how does this actually work? Normally with Superbase, 90% well not 90% of people, most people use the Superbase MCP. These things exploded in popularity when people finally realized what an MCP actually was. However, what's actually cooler is having Claude run its own CLI commands because what this is is it's a fully cohesive and integrated system where it can see the code next to the commands, right? So if it runs a command instead of you know running the command and then doing another command another MCP command to see whether or not the database changed instead it can just control absolutely everything here. What this means is that there's no mismatch between, for example, what you might have in a database on the cloud and what you think you have locally and what Claude thinks you have locally. Instead, you have everything local. And what you can do is you can push what you have local to dev or prod, right? So this is local local DB but it could be local anything and then push to main in order to test the code right. So this system is just far superior to the system here which I have on Grove where I have my SQL light running locally right or not running locally but it's an OM. It's basically like the the code of the database tables in code rather than in the tables themselves. Then I have Superbase and the actual data that Superbase has. And my connector right now is the MCP, but this just isn't an effective MCP at all or an effective connector at all.
So I've recently been working on this module here which is building production ready apps and in creating a solid foundation for a project. I'll leave this so you guys can just read through this. You can just pause. I'll just slowly scroll down so that you can have a look at these things. But basically, this is kind of what I've been talking about recently, which is the concept of foundational vibe coding or vibe coding with a foundation or vibe programming or whatever you want to call it. Effectively, you create step by step with an amazing foundation. You could just call this programming at the end of the day because this is what programmers do, but what most vibe coders aren't doing because they're just not aware of this. Now that I've been through the progress process though, I'm aware of all of these little things that you can optimize. And yeah, that's kind of what is in this course right here and also what I've been making videos about recently.
So you can see here this is now starting the Superbase. So Superbase start and it is setting everything up cohesively. And then after I've done this, once everything's set up and I have the database set up, etc., etc. What I can do is I can tell it to add everything it's done to its memory so far and how to control it. Like for example, if there was a special command to run my Superbase migration, I could say store that command every time you make a change to the database schema, run the migration so that I always have the most up-to-date code in the database. For example, now you can do this for all MCPS. Another one is Stripe. Okay, Stripe, I originally thought the MCP was an absolute godsend. The Stripe CLI is significantly better than the Stripe MCP. You cannot do certain actions with the Stripe MCP, probably for security. I'm not sure why, most likely security, but you can with the Stripe CLI.
So, now it's just making me a very basic index.html thing so that I can actually see what it's doing. And this is just a much better way to code than using MCPs. So if I go to open the So you can see here it's now connected connected to Superbase etc etc. So now I'm going to say um add me some dummy Runescape data and tables. So this is the magic right. Normally you would have to use the MCP for this, right? But you can you can just do everything here, everything local and then push to main when you finish the changes. I wish I had this set up for SEO growth. Massively wish I had this set up for SEO growth.
So you can see here now it's doing Superbase DB reset. So what I can what you can do is you can plant this in its memory. So every time it makes a database schema change, it will always run Superbase DB reset because that is the system that you have programmed. Now programming, programming is an interesting word. Programming for me means being able to put things together in a good way almost like building a house properly. It's not coding. I'm not writing code. I understand I'm not a coder, right? Oh god. But I am in my opinion a programmer.
Now let me just say uh display this data. So what this basically does is we can go to our tables here and we can see inventory items player quests players quests skills. It's actually got the real quests as well. That's not even that's not the quest. It's just called the holy grail. But the other ones are correct. And then all you have to do, which is the really really cool part about this guys, and this is what I really, really want to push home, is you can say set these up here as M variables, right? And then when you go live, all you have to do is change the M variables. That's it. That's why this setup is so amazing. Right now, this hasn't actually used M, right? So I will say in a second please use M so I can easily change the variables at a later date. This is our locally running superbase. You can see it's loc it's running locally. All we would have to do in the future is change the M variables run a migration and we have a live website. And then let's just see here if I just go back a few times. Okay this didn't work. I don't know. Load data. Beautiful. So we can load the data of the players, we can load the data of the items, beautiful, etc., etc.
So this is just a really easy way to set up the beginnings of a project which you can at a later date really really start to vibe code and expand upon. But because you've got that good initial baseline and good information, right? Okay, now these are just loading automatically. You've got that really good base and foundation. You can now start to code in confidence. Right? So now what I would say is please add all of this to your memory. How to do migrations etc. And then also set up superbase so it works with variables and fill in the with my local running stuff. And then yeah that's it. It will now just basically add all add all of that to its memory. If it adds it to a weird MD file, you can copy it and put it in uh project memory. So if I just exit out here, you can do memory. You can put it in user or project memory. Right? Select one of these and just copy and paste it into there. And then the other thing it'll do is it will set up a M. So in the future, you can very easily and very quickly just swap out the M variables for your live M variables.
I'll leave the video there, guys. This is why I've stopped using MCPS and I'm just using CLIs instead because they're just so much better, so much easier, so much more cohesive. Claude has everything it needs in one place without having to look externally. Thank you so much for watching. If you're watching all the way to the end of the video, as usual, you're an absolute legend. Check out the school community and I'll see you very very soon with some more content. Peace out.