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Something I'm trying to remove from my life is watching other people give their hot takes on something and substituting their experience instead of FAFO for myself. It's entirely understandable why people do this: there's a lot to know in our industry! Keeping up with everything is nearly impossible.
That said, I think there's a threshold where it's our actual duty to try something for ourselves to see what we think about it, rather than repeating some influencer on social. Given that I'm addicted to trying new things all the time, that threshold is pretty low. My rule is simple: if I write about it anywhere (blog, newsletter, social) I will have tried it for myself.
When do you decide to actually try something for yourself before forming your final opinion? Curious to know and, as always, you can hit reply and know I'll read it.
I put an Agent in your Agent
I gave two in-person workshops at NDC Porto in October and had an absolute blast. Porto is a brilliant city that reminded me of the Elden Ring expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, because of the verticality of the place.
The city is situated along the Douro and is built into the steep hillsides along both shores. There are also these multi-layer bridges that span the river, with roadways, train tracks, and multiple walkways. There's even a tram connecting the "upper levels" of the city to the lower by the water. It really does feel like a video game!
Anyway - the workshops were aimed at the growing group of .NET developers who are using VS Code because of the Copilot integration. Many .NETters are making the switch to VS Code for a variety of reasons (which I won't get in to), so it was extremely fun to flex my C# muscles again and see what was possible.
One of the people their asked about MCP (Model Context Protocol) and why it was such a Big Deal and I could give a summary answer, but since I had never made one, I didn't think I should go to deeply with my thoughts. Which is when the idea hit me: "I think we should build one with Claude in the workshop tomorrow; what do you think?"
This is what I love about workshops: learning together as a group, in real time!
Asking Cassini about Enceladus
Long story short: I created an MCP server using nuts and bolts ASP.NET and exposed the Cassini mission plan data to Claude Sonnet 4.5. The mission plan is roughly 65,000 entries, each representing a single study that Cassini carried out. Things like "Dust analysis of Saturn's E-ring" or "1200km flyby of Enceladus using the magnetometer." Fun stuff.
I loaded the data into SQLite, didn't use any kind of MCP framework, and let Claude "vibe out" the entire server. I fired it up and then asked "how many flybys of Enceladus did Cassini perform?"
I honestly have no idea how MCP works for a given LLM tool, but here's what I saw:
- The registered MCP server offered a manifest describing what it knows, and the tooling can decide to use that server based on the prompt coming in. Since I asked about a Saturn moon, the Cassini MCP server was used.
- Claude Code (the tooling) queried to the server to see what "resources" (data objects) and "tools" (functions) were available to answer the question.
- The final step was to execute a "tool" (function) to get the data it needed to answer the prompt.
This all happened in a fairly short amount of time using a JSON post over HTTP. Once Claude Sonnet had the results of the MCP query, it could then answer my question, which it did in stunning fashion.
It was so much fun that I decided to make a video about it, which you can watch right here. That's my AI newsletter site where I pop articles and videos from time to time and would love to send you some too!
I had loads of fun putting this together and can see how MCP servers will become indispensable moving forward. Your opinion on AI, while valid, should be set aside briefly because this is going to happen whether we like it or not. I think it's best to know what's going on either way...
So watch my video and, when you're done, go make your own and see what you think!
Thanks again for reading. I always love reading your replies and yes, I read every single one of them. I also wrote every single word of this post myself!
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