Building with AI · Building with the protocol stack
You can describe MCP's client/server split, list the three resource types a server exposes, and identify the production concerns — auth, transport, registry — you have to solve before you ship.
The Model Context Protocol is the layer that lets any agent reach any tool. By 2026 the ground truth is no longer scattered blog posts and hand-written config snippets: the official MCP registry is the durable discovery surface, and the 2026 roadmap is where transport, auth, registry, and governance work is tracked.
The next four lessons walk the stack end to end. You will start with the mental model — clients, servers, the three resource types, and why MCP is not just JSON-RPC with a fancy name. Then you will consume one: connect Claude Code or Cursor to Sentry, Linear, Notion and Postgres servers, and see what tool calls look like at runtime. Then you will build one — Python and TypeScript, 30 lines each — and feel where the schema work lives. The final lesson walks the production concerns the 2026 roadmap flags as the closing gaps: auth, rate limiting, HTTP+SSE transport, the registry.
By the end, MCP should stop feeling like a hand-wavy buzzword and start feeling like a small protocol you can read in an afternoon.
Type: multi-choice
Prompt: > What does an MCP server actually do?
Chapter contains 4 lessons.