AI Agents with MCP

Chapter 2. An Introduction to the Model Context Protocol

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 2nd 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].

To best understand MCP, it’s important to understand its history, what inspired its creation, what problems it solves for developers, and how it is designed. The growth of the protocol’s usage has been nothing short of explosive, and with the rapid development of the protocol itself, the official and unofficial software development kits, and the wider ecosystem, it’s easy to lose sight of why MCP was created in the first place and what problems it was designed to solve. Having a deep understanding of these things will help you better understand the design choices made in the protocol and how to best leverage the components that MCP provides.

First, we will get into a time machine and travel all the way back to 2024, when an Anthropic engineer was getting annoyed at having to constantly switch between Claude Desktop and his code editor. You will learn about the surprising origin story of MCP, the diverse tools and frustrations that inspired ...