Topic
Quick answer: Smithery and Powerduck both touch MCP hosting, but from opposite directions. Smithery is a registry and gateway: a large catalog of community and third-party servers, one-click connection, and
Read articleShort answer: A registry is a cloud-centered discovery layer; a local-first workflow keeps the contract in your repo and generates the server on save. The first is about finding and
Read articleShort answer: A generated server shows exactly which operation and schema produced each tool, and surfaces the operations it skipped because their metadata was incomplete. A catalog server is opaque:
Read articleShort answer: You do not need a registry to expose your own API. Keep the spec in the repo, generate the server, run it over a local transport for development,
Read articleShort answer: Both platforms offer a free tier, but the limits are shaped differently. A registry's free tier is metered per call and limited in namespaces; a generated
Read articleShort answer: A gateway's managed OAuth is the right tool for connecting agents to third-party services, because it centralizes client credentials and consent. A generated server focuses on
Read articleShort answer: A registry supplies a server someone else authored; a generator compiles your contract into a server. For your own API, the generated server is correct by construction and
Read articleShort answer: A gateway handles credentials, OAuth, and sessions for you and sits in the call path; a self-hosted server runs on your own infrastructure with no intermediary. Use a
Read articleShort answer: A registry is the right place to discover and connect to someone else's service; a generator is the right place to publish your own. If you
Read articleShort answer: The two tools sit at different layers and compose cleanly. Cursor writes the code and drives the agent; Powerduck defines the contract, generates the typed tools and mock,
Read articleShort answer: Stop paying an agent to re-derive the API from pasted notes. Put the OpenAPI file in the repo, generate the tools and mock from it, and let the
Read articleShort answer: Give the agent a local mock generated from the spec, not a live backend. It is deterministic, contract-shaped, and returns the edge cases on demand, with no account
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