A Hands-On Course · 9 lessons

MCP Server Design

Build Model Context Protocol servers agents can drive safely and discover on demand.

Short lessons (~5–8 min each), each with one tangible win and a retrieval-practice quiz. Built for engineers who already use AI coding tools and want the non-obvious mechanics.

Grounded in the agentpatterns.ai corpus (CC BY 4.0). Keep the Glossary open as you go.

Part 1 · The Surface

1 What a Server Exposes Before you name a single tool, you make one decision: what kind of capability is this? Pick the wrong primitive and every later choice fights you. 2 Data, Just in Time You have a corpus the agent might need. The temptation is to load it. The right move is to make it searchable and let the agent pull only what the current step requires.

Part 2 · Building Tools That Drive Well

3 The Right Call, Obvious A well-designed tool makes the correct call obvious. A poor one burns tokens on retries, confuses routing, and forces blind debugging. Three levers: the name, the schema, the error. 4 The Onboarding Gate Wiring in a new MCP server is the moment risk concentrates. One server can quietly hand an attacker private data, untrusted input, and a way out — all three legs at once. 5 Found and Versioned A great server nobody can find is dead weight. So is one that floods the window. Discoverability and token cost are two sides of the same budget — and they shape how your server evolves.

Part 3 · The Deeper Protocol

6 Typed and Hinted A tool's input schema is only half its contract. The other half — what it returns and what it promises about side effects — is where you let an agent trust a call without running it to find out. 7 The Server Talks Back Most of MCP runs one way: the client calls, the server answers. Two features reverse that arrow — the server asks the user, or asks the model. Both are powerful, and both widen the trust surface. 8 Code Mode When a workflow chains twenty tool calls and most of the data never matters, the fix isn't a better schema — it's letting the agent write code that does the chaining and hands back only the answer.

Capstone

9 Ship a Server Agents Can Drive Eight lessons, one decision sequence. Here's the whole course as a table you run top to bottom, plus a mixed review that pulls from every part.