A REST API makes sense to me…but this is apparently significantly different and more useful. What’s the best way to think about MCP compared to a traditional API? Where do I get started building one? Are there good examples to look at?
With a traditional API, people can build it any way they want, which means you (the client) need API docs.
With MCP, you literally restrict it to 2 things: get the list of tools, and call the tool (using the schema you got above). Thus the key insight is just about: let's add 1 more endpoint that lists the APIs you have, so that robots can find it.
Example time: - Build an MCP server (equivalent of "intro to flask 101"): https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/guides/remote-mcp-s... - Now you can add it to Claude Desktop/Cursor and see what it does - That's as far as i got lol
Then use FastMCP to write an MCP server in Python - https://github.com/jlowin/fastmcp
Finally, hook it up to an LLM client. It’s dead simple to do in Claude Code, create an .mcp.json file and define the server’s startup command.
The use case in AI is sort of reversed such that the code runs on your computer