If you’ve been building with AI agents, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: your agent needs to do things — query databases, call APIs, check systems — but wiring up each tool is a bespoke integration every time. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) solves this by giving agents a standard way to discover and invoke tools. Think of it as USB-C for AI tooling.
The problem? Most MCP tutorials stop at “run it locally with stdio.” That’s fine for solo dev work, but it falls apart the moment you need: