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CC Chris Coyier Chris Coyier A web developer known for building tools and writing for front-end developers, Chris Coyier founded CSS-Tricks, ran it from 2007 to 2022, and co-founded CodePen...

“It might cost you half a million tokens to do it and be really error prone, because the website didn't just expose the tools in a reasonable way. All WebMCP is, is: here's a command that I can run, here's a title and description for it so the agent can understand what it is, and here's a schema for how to call it. That's it. It's just a function call. But because it's in plain language, like a skill, the LLM can slurp that up.”

Shop Talk Show · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“It might cost you half a million tokens to do it and be really error prone, because the website didn't just expose the tools in a reasonable way. All WebMCP is, is: here's a command that I can run, here's a title and description for it so the agent can understand what it is, and here's a schema for how to call it. That's it. It's just a function call. But because it's in plain language, like a skill, the LLM can slurp that up.” — Chris Coyier, Shop Talk Show

Context

Rupert had described asking an agent to book a flight. Coyier says agents can already do that by driving a website, but badly, and explains WebMCP as a way for a site to hand agents a described function to call instead.

Transcript

Shop Talk Show Around 28:39 into the episode
Chris Coyier

right. And can you see that like you're, I don't know, there's, there's the sidebar on the left and the browser on the left, and you're kind of seeing it do the work. That's what WebMCP kind of unlocks and it can do so really efficiently. That's neat. And

Dave Rupert

…like, here's my known traveler number or what my TSA, you know, just go chuck that in there. What, you know, like, like, get me as far as you can in the process and then I'll finish it. You know, like, I think I would, I would appreciate that just because I hate doing that, you know. And then it

Chris Coyier

like probably can now or some things can, but it might cost you whatever, half a million tokens to do it and be really error prone because the website didn't just expose the tools in this reasonable way. And all WebMCP is, is here's a command that I can run. Here's a title and description for it so the agent can understand what it is. And here's a schema for how to call it. This is the exact data that it needs in returns. That's it. That's all it is. That's all it does. It's just a function call. But because it's in plain language, like a skill or something, the LLM can slurp that up. It's kind of neat. But like, I could see how somebody might be down on this feature too, be like, well, who, what browsers want this? You can't just ship stuff, JavaScript functions and pretend like that doesn't matter. Like we need to be protective over that stuff. I don't think anybody's doing a bad job yet, but it does make it really slow. It's unlike other AI features that just go, go, go, go, go. This is built into browsers, so it has to be slow and people have to agree on how it's going to work, you know? Yeah.

Dave Rupert

Yeah. I mean, I'm, yeah, I don't, I think it does need to go slower. I think if you just hit full send on it, you know, you'd be bad. It

Chris Coyier

is, right? Because you call this function to register the command. What if people start writing that function right in the middle of their JavaScript? It's going to throw in another browser. And now it's something's broken in Firefox because Chrome shipped it or whatever. They're not. Nobody's…

Dave Rupert

you could build your API kind of, you know, like. You know, and then you just, and those are just internal functions, and then your MCP just calls internal functions, hopefully. You know, it's like not calling new, net new code, you know, it's like,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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