AI Agents with MCP

Chapter 1. Agentic AI and MCP

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. There is a GitHub repository in progress with code examples.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Towards the end of 2024, Anthropic released the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to great fanfare. Not only did Anthropic standardize a way to transform chatbots from simple talkers into agents that could act, but they released MCP concurrently with support from popular AI-powered IDEs as well as Anthropic’s Claude Desktop, driving rapid adoption. One of the major pieces of the MCP architecture, the MCP servers, was made to be incredibly simple to spin up, but powerfully complex when advanced workflows were needed. This lead to a rapid flood of user-created MCP servers, augmenting generative AI workflows and cementing the adoption of MCP as the standard for building AI agents.

This book aims to go deep into MCP, taking you beyond the available documentation and giving you a deep understanding of the MCP architecture, the features the protocol and its SDKs provide, and most importantly, how to use that understanding to build your own MCP servers and clients and augment ...