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 are they, what do they do, and what kinds ...
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