What RPC features does MCP lack?

Distributed tracing, cost attribution per tool call, service discovery without connecting, schema version negotiation, and standardized error propagation across tool chains.

Why does tool accuracy drop with 50 plus MCP tools?

The LLM must pick from a large tool schema that fills context. At 50+ tools the selection accuracy drops below 50% because the model confuses similar tool descriptions.

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clawsmith.com/signal/mcp-missing-rpc-primitives-distributed-systems

⚠ IssueUnderservedai_agent_mcpLive

MCP ignores 40 years of distributed RPC lessons including tracing cost attribution and version management

Senior engineers argue MCP re-makes every mistake RPC systems learned to avoid: no built-in distributed tracing (debugging tool chains is painful), no cost attribution per service, no version negotiation standard, no service discovery without connecting, no schema evolution story. By 50+ tools, tool selection accuracy drops below 50%. Enterprises deploying MCP build on a foundation that lacks what every production RPC system since 1982 has had. HN post got 409 points + 227 comments from senior engineers citing CORBA/SOAP lessons.

Product Idea from this Signal

A web app that brings distributed tracing, cost attribution, and version management to MCP server deployments

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Teams running multi-agent systems over MCP have no visibility into which tool calls cost what, which server version caused a regression, or how a request flowed across a chain of MCP servers. General-purpose LLM observability tools like Langfuse and Helicone trace at the model call level but are blind to the MCP protocol layer, leaving the hard-won lessons of distributed RPC systems (trace propagation, per-service cost budgets, version diffs, rollback) completely absent. This app gives MCP operators a production-grade control plane: trace every tool invocation end-to-end, attribute latency and token cost per server and tool, manage server versions with diff and rollback, and set per-team cost budgets.

mcpobservabilitydistributed-tracingcost-attributionversion-managementai-agentsdeveloper-tools

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