Ray Deck and Speaker B discuss how AI agents are accessed via slash commands like "/agent-name" and how MCP servers are becoming a new business model. They trace the shift from manual setup friction to one-click installation and cloud-run MCPs, and argue that user experience is moving from dedicated apps to being embedded in tools like Cursor and Claude.
What I'm seeing around the corner? I am seeing agents more around the corner. One of the neat things about Cloud Code, I'm also seeing this in Dia, is agents as slashes. The idea of the slash command, slash and then name of your agent and then give it some arguments. As being a way that we are interacting with agents much, much more. And the— and the— I hadn't really understood that until I saw it like twice in a day, like seeing both Claude Code and DIA work the same way on this. And I think we're going to see more of them work that way too. The DIA calls them skills instead of calling them agents, but basically it's a prompt, right, with access to a certain set of tools. And then that's It's the definition of an agent, with its own memory space to be able to figure stuff out. You combine that with, you were alluding to the MCP stuff that you were doing before. Are you using MCPs? You're able to configure them through the web interface, like you're talking about using GitHub, whatever, they call integrations. Yes.
Sorry, mine's on the desktop at the moment. But with, I mean, with Cloud, the big thing with, with Cloud CLI is that you can apparently run them in the cloud, right? So it's, it's not reliant on, on your actual— yes, that's, I think that's the next step, right?
So the ones that run in the cloud are, are pretty cool, uh, and then they're also close to the ones that can run, uh, locally. But I think that the, the, the cloud-based MCPs are sort of emergent right now. I think building I, I've now seen my first, uh, first businesses that are built with that, where the business is expressed as an MCP server as a first-class consideration. Wow. Right? So like, instead of a, oh, I've got my SaaS, my SaaS now has an MCP, it's like, no, my SaaS is MCP, right? The way you, the way you interact with it is through MCP. And now instead of them going making a big complicated SaaS or web interface or whatever it is they need It's just nothing.
It's just MCP. That's amazing.
And that actually shifts where the work is from the front end to the back end, which I think is really, really neat.
Yeah.
So your adoption of MCP is you're seeing a massive exponential curve upwards. Yeah. And I think even when MCP, like 3 months ago, MCP was actually really hard to work with. Right? Because you'd have to go, you know, edit a JSON file and only worked with like Cursor and, um, you know, Claude code and maybe a couple of others, right? Um, and the, um, and like everything had to be done through like— yeah, you had to have NPX installed, right? And or, uh, UV in order to be able to get these things running. And like there was— there were companies like Smitherey that were out there to sort of help deploy the right things for you. But like the friction was huge and yet there was big heat to make it happen, right? Like people could see, people who experienced it said, oh, this is really amazing when it works. We need to get this thing in here. And the act, so the, it was hard to make it happen, but high value when it was happening. And the thing that over the course of the last 90 days is they've become much easier to distribute, right? So now instead of having to go edit a JSON file all the time, Cursor has now introduced support for one-click installation of MCP servers. You can add an MCP server, you can expose a link, and then it will just go in. The support now for streaming and what have you based MCP servers means that you can drop a URL into, say, your Claude and say, I want to use this one. And then it'll immediately log you in using OAuth because it has that authentication that can be happening out of band integrated immediately, and then you're in and you're done. So I'm seeing that adoption go up even more, right? Because previously the utility was high and now the friction is less and now the wheel really turns., right? Because, you know, now an even bigger set of people with more value, more businesses will therefore want to be able to tap into that market. That creates more MCP servers, which creates more demand. And, and I think that's just gonna, you know, balloon out and significantly change the way that we look at user experience. Because now user experience is no longer on a page or an app that you control, but inside the context of whatever the primary app is that you don't control, right? Like Cursor is one type of experience, Claude is another type of experience, but your MCP, your service, your company is existing inside them both, and that's going to be a very different kind of thing. And the folks who are working on MCP recognize this, and so we're seeing changes in this, in the specification for MCP, which I think moving towards like micro front-end style things where, uh, right now kind of MCP is RAG plus, it's sort of injecting text into that you're, uh, the, uh, the chat agent that knows how to and then going forward I think it's going to be, oh, and by the way, here's something that we want the user to actually experience or work with, right, as part of this process or, or as an output. And then getting those to be expressed in the context of that is going to be, I think, a key thing that comes next. But the, the business opportunities are enormous for it.
