🔌 MCP Mastery: The Model Context Protocol
Learn MCP Mastery: The Model Context Protocol on AI4AI — short, hands-on lessons with live AI runs, at three reading levels (beginner to expert). Free to start.
What you'll learn
- MCP: The Universal Connector for AI Tools (7 min) — MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that defines how AI models commun…
- MCP Architecture: Hosts, Clients, and Servers (7 min) — MCP (Model Context Protocol) splits tool-use into three distinct roles so that AI applications stay modular and secure.…
- Using MCP Servers: Connecting Your Assistant to the Real World (8 min) — An MCP server is a small, separately running process that exposes a set of typed tools, resources, and prompts to an AI…
- Building Your Own MCP Server: Exposing Tools and Resources Cleanly and Safely (8 min) — An MCP server exposes two main primitives to a connected AI model: **tools** (callable functions the model can invoke, …
- MCP Security: Scopes, Permissions, and Least Privilege (8 min) — MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources — calendars, databases, code rep…
- Composing Multiple MCP Servers into One Capable Assistant (8 min) — A single MCP server exposes a focused set of tools (e.g., file I/O, web search, or a database query interface). Real wo…
Lessons
MCP: The Universal Connector for AI Tools
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that defines how AI models communicate with external tools, data sources, and services. Before MCP, every developer who wanted to connect a model to, say, a database or a calendar API had to wr…
MCP Architecture: Hosts, Clients, and Servers
MCP (Model Context Protocol) splits tool-use into three distinct roles so that AI applications stay modular and secure. **Host** is the top-level application — a chat UI, an IDE plugin, or an agent runtime. The host owns the LLM context window, decides which servers are allowed …
Using MCP Servers: Connecting Your Assistant to the Real World
An MCP server is a small, separately running process that exposes a set of typed tools, resources, and prompts to an AI assistant over a standardized JSON-RPC interface. The assistant (the MCP client) discovers what the server can do by calling `tools/list` or `resources/list` a…
Building Your Own MCP Server: Exposing Tools and Resources Cleanly and Safely
An MCP server exposes two main primitives to a connected AI model: **tools** (callable functions the model can invoke, like an API endpoint) and **resources** (readable data the model can fetch, like files or database rows). You build a server by implementing the MCP specificati…
MCP Security: Scopes, Permissions, and Least Privilege
MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources — calendars, databases, code repos, APIs. Each connection carries a set of permissions called scopes, which define exactly what the agent is allowed to read, write, or execute. Following the p…
Composing Multiple MCP Servers into One Capable Assistant
A single MCP server exposes a focused set of tools (e.g., file I/O, web search, or a database query interface). Real workflows become powerful when a host application — such as Claude Desktop, a custom LangChain agent, or a purpose-built orchestrator — connects to several MCP se…