Topic

MCP & Tool Integration

Connect assistants to real tools, design usable tool APIs, and avoid unsafe integrations.

10 stories (4 articles · 6 videos)

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A few good first pieces before you browse the full feed.

MCP for the non-engineer: connect Claude or Cursor to your tools

MCP is the new standard for connecting AI to your tools. You don't need to write one to benefit. A non-engineer's guide to what MCP is, which servers to install, and what becomes possible once your AI can actually act.

Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.

MCP from scratch: build a production-ready server in TypeScript

Building a production Model Context Protocol server requires more than wiring up a few tools. The patterns for schema design, auth, error handling, streaming, observability, and the production realities that make MCP servers useful at scale.

Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.

Designing MCP tools that LLMs actually use correctly

Most MCP tools we see are technically correct and practically useless. LLMs ignore them, misuse them, or call them in unhelpful ways. The principles for designing tools LLMs adopt naturally, with examples of common failures and their fixes.

Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.

More in this topic

Structured outputs and function calling: the production patterns

Structured outputs and function calling are the bridge from 'LLM that generates text' to 'system that does work'. In production, the patterns that matter are about schemas, error handling, idempotency, and graceful degradation — not just JSON mode.

Evaluate the implementation pattern, failure modes, and guardrails before building.

Prompting for Agents | Code w/ Claude

Anthropic. Hannah Moran and Jeremy Hadfield from Applied AI walking through how to phrase tool calls and agent prompts on a real Pokemon-playing agent — when to push behavior into the system prompt versus the tool description, what the model needs to know about each tool's preconditions. Useful immediately after you write your first MCP server and find Claude calling it in unexpected ways.

Building more effective AI agents

Anthropic. Anthropic engineers walking through what they actually changed when their multi-agent systems were misusing tools — collapsing endpoints, returning names instead of IDs, leaning on MCPs and Agent Skills instead of stuffing more tools into the system prompt. Maps point-for-point onto the article's checklist for tool descriptions and return-shape design.

Building Agents with Model Context Protocol - Full Workshop with Mahesh Murag of Anthropic

AI Engineer. Anthropic's Mahesh Murag walking through MCP's design — why tools, resources, and prompts are separated, how clients negotiate capabilities, what production hosts actually do with the protocol. Watch it after the build to understand the parts of MCP the SDK quietly hides and to calibrate the article's "production-ready" checklist against the spec authors' intent.

The Ultimate MCP Crash Course - Build From Scratch

Web Dev Simplified. A full, code-along build of both an MCP server and a client in TypeScript — tool definitions, schemas, prompts and resources, stdio transport, inspector debugging. It's the closest video on YouTube to actually doing what the article asks you to do, at a pace where you can pause and follow along in your own editor.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Anthropic. The protocol's designers — Theo Chu, David Soria Parra and Alex Albert — walking through why MCP exists, the components (server, client, transport), the reception since the November 2024 release, and which servers they actually use day-to-day. Useful as the canonical source after the Nate Herk overview.

How MCPs Make Agents Smarter (for non-techies)

Nate Herk | AI Automation. A 16-minute, no-jargon explanation of what an MCP server is, how clients like Claude and n8n use them, and what you actually do differently once you have one. Lines up almost exactly with the article's "connect Claude or Cursor to your tools" framing.