Latchkey: Imbue Says Forget MCP, Just Use Curl
Here's a hot take from Imbue, the $200M+ AI research lab formerly known as Generally Intelligent: the whole MCP ecosystem might be overengineered. Their new tool Latchkey takes a radically simpler approach to the agent-to-API problem. Instead of building custom MCP servers for every service, just let agents use plain old curl with auto-injected credentials.
The idea is disarmingly simple. An agent prepends latchkey to any curl command, and Latchkey handles authentication transparently. It supports 20+ services out of the box including Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, Discord, and AWS. Credentials are stored locally and encrypted. No intermediary server, no custom protocol, no lock-in. If you can describe it as an HTTP request, your agent can already use it.
This matters because MCP's biggest friction point isn't the protocol itself, it's the integration tax. Every new service needs a dedicated MCP server, maintained code, protocol-specific adapters. Latchkey sidesteps all of that by saying: APIs already exist, documentation already exists, agents already know how to read docs and write curl. Just give them the keys.
The tool is MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript, and installable via npm, skills.sh, or ClawHub. It also supports browser-based OAuth flows where the agent opens a browser window and asks the user to log in. Whether this replaces MCP or simply complements it is an open question, but the argument is compelling: the simplest integration is the one you don't have to build.
https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey
← Back to all articles
The idea is disarmingly simple. An agent prepends latchkey to any curl command, and Latchkey handles authentication transparently. It supports 20+ services out of the box including Slack, GitHub, Google Workspace, Discord, and AWS. Credentials are stored locally and encrypted. No intermediary server, no custom protocol, no lock-in. If you can describe it as an HTTP request, your agent can already use it.
This matters because MCP's biggest friction point isn't the protocol itself, it's the integration tax. Every new service needs a dedicated MCP server, maintained code, protocol-specific adapters. Latchkey sidesteps all of that by saying: APIs already exist, documentation already exists, agents already know how to read docs and write curl. Just give them the keys.
The tool is MIT-licensed, written in TypeScript, and installable via npm, skills.sh, or ClawHub. It also supports browser-based OAuth flows where the agent opens a browser window and asks the user to log in. Whether this replaces MCP or simply complements it is an open question, but the argument is compelling: the simplest integration is the one you don't have to build.
https://github.com/imbue-ai/latchkey
Comments