Brief

This article provides a beginner's guide to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard for connecting AI applications. MCP defines rules for feeding context into AI models, allowing agents to understand application data and architecture. The protocol operates on three primitives: Resources (data holders), Tools (executable functions), and Prompts (pre-defined instructions). The guide also details building an MCP server in TypeScript, emphasizing the need for runtime validation with libraries like Zod to handle LLM-generated inputs, and explains how to define tool metadata like readOnlyHint and destructiveHint to establish guardrails for AI actions. AI