Coding Challenge #104 - MCP Server For AI Agents

Hi this is John with this week’s Coding Challenge.

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Coding Challenge #104 - MCP Server For AI Agents

This challenge is to build an MCP server and hook it up to an AI agent.

So What Is MCP And Why Would You Want To Build An MCP Server?

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is an open standard for connecting AI applications to other systems. It solves a similar problem to the Language Server Protocol (LSP). Where LSP allows language servers and development tools (i.e. editors and IDEs) to communicate so that any editor can use the language server for a specific programming language and a language implementor only needs to provide on Language Server to support all IDEs and editors, MCP allows all AI application and other systems to talk without every AI application and every system having to write bespoke clients and APIs for each other.

While we’re on the topic, if you want to learn more about LSP there is a build your own language server coding challenge.

The benefit of an MCP server is that it allows an AI application (i.e. an agent) to connect to data sources (e.g. documentation for an API, local files, document stores or data bases), tools (e.g. GitHub, Notion, search engineers, Playwright, or Figma), and workflows, enabling them to access information not in their training data and perform tasks.

🚨 Live Workshops For Paid Subscribers

I’m running a love workshop on AI-assisted software engineering. It’s happening on Friday 9th January at 17:00 GMT. It will be run on Zoom and is free for all paid subscribers.

The workshop will address the following questions, giving you my answers:

1. Are LLMs AI?

2. What is an LLM?

3. What is an AI coding assistant?

4. Why do we care what an AI coding assistant is?

5. How can we use that knowledge to get the most from them?

6. There must be more to it than that! How can we leverage AI to build better software?

Which will help you make better use of AI when developing software.

I’ll also be demonstrating how to build a very simple AI coding agent during the workshop.

Future workshops will be run monthly for paid subscribers, who will be able to request and vote on future topics.

More Videos Added To The Coding Challenges YouTube Channel!

I’m continuing to add new videos to the Coding Challenges YouTube Channel, if you’re interested please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel. If you have suggestions for content, please hit reply / send me a message with them.

Recent videos cover:

• Tips for AI-Assisted Software Engineering.

You can find these videos and several others on the Coding Challenges YouTube Channel.

If you’re interested in AI engineering or leveraging AI for developing code you might also enjoy the interview I did with a Director of Software Engineering at Oracle Cloud.

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