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My Weird Prompts · August 12 · 25 min

MCP Binary Payloads: Why URLs Beat Base64

Daniel's aggregated MCP setup keeps hitting the same wall: remote tools need binary files, but MCP is JSON-RPC and can't express raw bytes. In this episode, we break down the three ways to represent binary data in MCP, why the stage-and-pass-a-URL pattern isn't a workaround but the protocol's maximum expression, and whether the transport underneath actually matters. Plus, we look at the File Uploads Working Group and the three possible directions for closing this gap—and why the aggregation layer has a second problem no fix can solve. Episode #756501 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/756501

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Daniel's aggregated MCP setup keeps hitting the same wall: remote tools need binary files, but MCP is JSON-RPC and can't express raw bytes. In this episode, we break down the three ways to represent binary data in MCP, why the stage-and-pass-a-URL pattern isn't a workaround but the protocol's maximum expression, and whether the transport underneath actually matters. Plus, we look at the File Uploads Working Group and the three possible directions for closing this gap—and why the aggregation layer has a second problem no fix can solve.

Episode #756501 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/756501

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