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AI Agents with MCP
book

AI Agents with MCP

by Kyle Stratis
September 2026
Intermediate to advanced
350 pages
10h 3m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from AI Agents with MCP

Chapter 3. Making an Intelligent Application Agentic with MCP Clients

When working with MCP, you will typically be working with (or building!) clients or servers. On some projects, you may be able to build both. To really understand the protocol and use it to its full potential on your projects, you will need to be conversant with all components of the MCP architecture.

Besides understanding the protocol better, why build clients at all? Even now, as MCP has matured, there is still a lack of software out there that fully supports the MCP specification. If you’re building a coding agent harness, an IDE, a chatbot, an agent framework, or any other LLM-powered application that you want users (or other developers) to extend the capabilities of, you need to build a client into your application. This chapter will help you do just that.

First, we will dig in to host applications: what they are, what they do, and what kinds of applications can benefit from incorporating MCP. Then, we will examine the client itself. This is what makes the host application a host: it hosts the client(s), which in turn enable the host application to communicate with MCP servers.

There is one catch, though: a single client instance can talk to only a single server. If you want to access multiple servers, you will have to launch multiple client instances within the host application, all living on the async exit stack. Chapter 4 delves deeper into connecting to multiple servers.

Then, you will see a very simple ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798341639546Errata Page