GoKawiilI've long envied Zapier's extensive connectors library. I wish our app – Val Town, a vibe coding platform – could one-click connect to every app.
This is a classic n² problem, connecting every app to every other app.
My dream has always been that there could be some protocol by which any app could dynamically authenticate and authorize any other app.
Is OAuth that protocol?
Almost!
Registering OAuth Clients
The core n² problem remains: every app still needs to register as an OAuth client for every other app.
At best, registering an OAuth client is 5 minutes of clicking around a developer portal. But you never know. It can mean filling out some forms, making a demo video, signing paperwork, or, horror of horrors, getting on a video call. It's a ad-hoc, manual headache. And we all have to do it for every single app our users want to connect to.
But there's reason for hope! Anthropic and OpenAI saw this problem coming. They need a way to connect to all their customers' apps, but they didn't want to get all those OAuth clients. So they put a little-known OAuth extension into the spec for MCP: Dynamic Client Registration (DCR).
Dynamic Client Registration (DCR)
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