Building a Customer-Facing MCP Server: What Do You Actually Need?
In the previous article, we looked at how MCP works behind the scenes and the role played by clients, servers, tools, resources, and prompts.
This time, let's look at a specific use case: building a c
codelikeawoman.com7 min read
The "capabilities over API mirror" framing is the right mental model, and it takes a few embarrassing false starts before it clicks. The moment it clicked for me was realizing the AI client doesn't know your data model — it only knows what the tool description says. A tool called get_documents with a vague description never gets called correctly; find_invoices_by_vendor_and_date_range with a two-line description that includes the expected output format hits on the first try, consistently.
The stdio→HTTP migration point is also underrated — most tutorials skip it because they don't model concurrent connections or session state. For multi-tenant setups, per-session context isolation is the piece most examples handle poorly or not at all.