Kristofer Lachance

The Perplexity CTO announced at their developer conference this week that they're moving away from MCP internally. Garry Tan tweeted "MCP sucks honestly." Pieter Levels called it useless. The "MCP is dead, long live the CLI" post hit the top of Hacker News. OpenClaw, the hottest open-source agent project in the world, deliberately chose not to support it.

The argument: MCP tool definitions eat your context window. Auth is clunky. The whole thing is an unnecessary abstraction over APIs that already exist. LLMs are smart enough to call APIs directly, or use CLIs, or write their own integration code. Why add a protocol layer?

Last year we hired a design agency to build our marketing site for @Basedash. They did an incredible job. The headline makes it sound like I'm dunking on them, but I'm not. The site was genuinely great. They built it in Framer so we could manage content ourselves, which was a completely reasonable bet at the time (and something we explicitly asked for).

After four long years of grinding, building, fundraising, and hiring, we decided to pivot. I wanted to write down my thought process and timeline because I wish I d seen more honest pivot stories when we were stuck. Not just we pivoted and everything was instantly great but the real version where we kept trying to make the original idea work for way too long because we already put so much into it.

I went through YC S20 (the first COVID batch) as a solo founder working on @Basedash. After YC, I did what you re supposed to do. I talked to users. I built product. I did founder-led sales. I hired a great team. It felt like progress because I was constantly busy and the product kept getting better.