What Peter Steinberger thinks about MCP
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Peter Steinberger did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
2 dated positions, 2025 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Peter Steinberger has said — not written or endorsed by them.
-
Their wordsI think the main beauty is, is that models are really good at calling Unix commands. So if you just add another CLI, that's just another Unix command in the end. And MCP is… That has to be added in training. That's not a very natural thing for the model. It requires a very specific syntax. And the biggest thing, it's not composable.
↗OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491youtube.com 19th of 30 in this recording
- 6 months earlier
-
Their wordsEven removed my last MCP, since Claude sometimes would go off spinning up Playwright unasked when it could simply read the code - which is faster and pollutes the context less.