Your MCP Server is Bad (and you should feel bad) - Jeremiah Lowin, Prefect

By ai.engineer

Categories: AI, Tools

Summary

Prefect CEO Jeremiah Lowin reveals that his open-source MCP server tool, fastmcp, has been downloaded over 1.5 million times in a single day, highlighting the need for optimized agent-centric product design rather than assuming AI can use human-centric APIs.

Key Takeaways

  1. Design MCP servers as optimized interfaces for AI agents, not human APIs.
  2. Acknowledge AI limitations and fallibility rather than assuming they are perfect oracles.
  3. Position your open-source project as the high-level interface to an ecosystem, while the SDK focuses on low-level primitives.
  4. Maintain an open-source project that becomes the de facto standard for its use case, as fastmcp has for building MCP servers.
  5. Interpret negative feedback charitably, as an opportunity to help users do better, not as a personal attack.
  6. Build an intuition for agentic product design, considering the strengths and weaknesses of AI agents as you would for human users.

Topics

Transcript Excerpt

I really do appreciate that you're all here. I'm going to try and make this as painless as possible. We're not going to do an interactive part. We're going to talk through stuff. I'm happy to go off script. I'm happy to take questions if there's stuff we want to explore at any moment in this. My goal is I'd like to share with you a lot of things that I've learned. Um I'm going to try and make them as actionable as possible. So there is real stuff to do here. Um more than we might in like a more ...