Yeah I had a bit of an experiment with MCP this morning, to see if I could get a quick plugin demo out for it. It's a bit tricky! The official mcp Python library really wants you to run asyncio and connect to the server and introspect the available tools.
I'm a heavy user of the llm tool, so as soon as I saw your post, I started tinkering with MCP.
I’ve just published an alpha version that works with stdio-based MCP servers (tested with @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem) - https://github.com/Virtuslab/llm-tools-mcp. Very early stage, so please make sure to use with --ta option (Manually approve every tool execution).
The code is still messy and there are a couple of TODOs in the README.md, but I plan to work on it full-time until the end of the week.
Some questions:
Where do you think mcp.json should be stored? Also, it might be a bit inconvenient to specify tools one by one with -T. Do you think adding a --all-tools flag or supporting glob patterns like -T name-prefix* in llm would be a good idea?
1. A single class can have multiple tool methods in it, you just have to specify it once
2. Toolboxes can take configuration
With a Toolbox, your plugin could work like this:
llm -T 'MCP("path/to/mcp.json")' ...
You might even be able to design it such that you don't need a mcp.json at all, and everything gets passed to that constructor.
There's one catch: currently you would have to dynamically create the class with methods for each tool, which is possible in Python but a bit messy. I have an open issue to make that better here: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1111
