Focus 01
Tool surface design
Expose the few tools the model can call accurately, with clear names, arguments and failure modes.
MCP servers designed for the caller you actually have
MCP lets agents call your tools. Good MCP design is API design for a model caller.
What this is
Tool focus: Model Context Protocol
Design Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and integrations for agentic AI: tool surface, scopes, secrets, transport choice and review patterns.
Focus 02
Scopes, secrets, and identity
Authentication, per-user scopes, secret storage and agent-host identity are designed before the server is useful.
Focus 03
Transport choice
stdio, HTTP or SSE is chosen deliberately, with notes on what would justify changing it later.
Engagement
How the work runs
Tool inventory
Which internal tools exist, which the agent should reach, what the existing API surface already does, and what new shape the MCP server needs.
Design and skeleton
Tool naming, argument schema, scopes, transport and error model. First tools go live in a skeleton server.
Real integration
Codex, Claude Code or an internal agent calls the server on real tasks. Logs shape the tool surface.
Hardening and handover
Secrets in the right vault, observability live, runbook written, and a written review of the design decisions and what would trigger a revisit.
FAQ
Questions teams ask first
Both, depending on the tool. Off-the-shelf servers exist for common things and there is no point reimplementing them. Custom servers are worth it when the tool is specifically yours: an internal API, a domain-specific search, a private dataset.
stdio for local single-developer integration, HTTP for shared internal services, SSE where the tool produces a stream the agent should react to. The choice is decided early because changing it later is expensive.
The MCP server should look like any other API to the identity layer: it is a client of the same SSO, it respects the same scopes, and its calls show up in the same audit trail. The agent does not get a parallel identity universe.
Next step
Book an MCP design call
Most useful where the team has internal tools they want an agent to reach. If the only goal is using off-the-shelf MCP servers in Claude Code, the Claude Code workshop is a better starting point.