Chapter 1. Agentic AI and MCP
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.
But what brought us from large language models (LLMs) to agents? To be glib: a whole lot of experimentation. When LLMs first entered the public consciousness, the primary way to interact with them was via a chat dialog ...
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