The MCP Handbook · early access

Give your AI astandard wayto reach the world.

Building with the Model Context Protocol — giving AI a standard way to reach your tools, data, and code.

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Written by Tishan David — a Sydney developer who has spent the last two years building with MCP.

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An open standard, adopted fast —OpenAIGoogle DeepMindMicrosoftLinux Foundation

Tishan David at his desk, two monitors of code behind him

The person behind it

Hi, I'm Tishan.

I'm a software developer in Sydney with more than ten years spent building production systems — backends, developer tooling, and lately a lot of AI. For the past two years I've been deep in the Model Context Protocol: building servers and clients, wiring it into Claude Desktop and Claude Code, and shipping it into real agents.

I wrote The MCP Handbook to be the guide I wish I'd had when I started — clear, practical, and honest about the sharp edges. This site is where I share what I learn along the way.

More about me →

Why MCP

Frameworks churn. Protocols compound.

The case for learning the protocol first — and why every frontier lab agreed.

The problem

A model is brilliant and blind. It can’t see your files, your database, or your ticketing system — and every new source has meant another bespoke connector to build and maintain.

The protocol

MCP is one open standard — a USB-C port for AI. A server you write once is understood by every compliant client, collapsing N×M custom integrations into N+M.

The payoff

Build once, run everywhere: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and any agent that speaks MCP. What you ship compounds instead of decaying with the next model.

$19.99 → free

The book

The MCP Handbook

The complete guide to the Model Context Protocol — from Claude Desktop to autonomous agents with Claude Code.

Explain what MCP is and why it beats one-off integrations — in language your team will actually understand.
Wire real servers into Claude Desktop and Claude Code, including the npx-vs-uvx gotchas that trip everyone up.
Evaluate and trust third-party servers before you let them anywhere near your data.
Build production-grade MCP servers in Python with FastMCP and in TypeScript with the official SDK.
Use the three primitives — tools, resources, and prompts — plus sampling and elicitation, the way the spec intends.

$19.99Free in early access

See the full contents →

From the blog

Notes from building with MCP

Field notes, patterns, and opinions — written while shipping.

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Jun 22, 20268 min

Remote vs Local MCP Servers: Choosing a Transport

stdio or Streamable HTTP? The data layer is identical either way — the real decision is about where your server runs and who uses it. A field guide to choosing.

MCPTransportsArchitecture

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Jun 13, 20267 min

Claude Code + MCP: My Daily Workflow

How I actually use MCP day to day in Claude Code: adding servers, the -- gotcha, committed .mcp.json, @ resources, slash-command prompts, and the env vars that save hours.

MCPClaude CodeWorkflow

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Jun 3, 20269 min

The Lethal Trifecta: MCP Security in Practice

Private data, untrusted content, and a way to phone home — combine all three and you have built an exfiltration machine. A practical tour of MCP's real attack surface and how to shut it down.

MCPSecurityAgents

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Tech bits — quick, copy-paste wins

All tech bits →

bash

Add an MCP server to Claude Code

Register a remote or local server in one line — and remember the lone -- that separates Claude's flags from the server command.

# remote, OAuth-backed server
claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp

claude-codeclistdio

python

Never print to stdout in a stdio server

On the stdio transport, stdout is reserved for JSON-RPC messages — send every log line to stderr or the client drops the connection.

import sys

# WRONG: this corrupts the JSON-RPC stream on stdout

stdiodebuggingpython

python

A minimal FastMCP tool

Type hints become the schema and the docstring becomes the description — a complete MCP tool in a handful of lines.

from mcp.server.fastmcp import FastMCP

mcp = FastMCP("Demo")

pythonfastmcptools

python

Use streamable_http_client, not the old name

The Python client helper was renamed — streamablehttp_client is deprecated in favour of streamable_http_client.

# deprecated spelling
# from mcp.client.streamable_http import streamablehttp_client

pythonclienttransports

MCP packages

A searchable shelf of servers

Real MCP servers, each linked to its source and ready to install.

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GitHub

★ 19.5k

GitHub's official server for repositories, issues, pull requests, and Actions — rewritten in Go and available remotely.

claude mcp add --transport http github https://api.githubcopilot.com/mcp/

Goofficialvendorgithub

source ↗

Playwright

★ 16.5k

Microsoft's official browser-automation server — navigate, click, fill forms, and scrape using accessibility snapshots.

npx -y @playwright/mcp@latest

TypeScriptvendorbrowserautomation

source ↗

Filesystem

★ 8.4k

Secure, configurable file system access — read, write, search, and edit files within directories you explicitly allow.

npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem /path/to/dir

TypeScriptofficialreferencefiles

source ↗

Memory

★ 6.7k

A persistent knowledge-graph memory so the model can remember entities and relations across sessions.

npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-memory

TypeScriptofficialreferencememory

source ↗

Sequential Thinking

★ 5.9k

A tool for structured, step-by-step reasoning the model can revise as it works through a problem.

npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-sequential-thinking

TypeScriptofficialreferencereasoning

source ↗

Fetch

★ 5.2k

Fetch a URL and convert the page into clean Markdown for the model to read.

uvx mcp-server-fetch

Pythonofficialreferenceweb

source ↗

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