I've built a handful of MCP servers. Here's what separates a good one from a demo.
7.7 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth 8
novelty 7
actionability 9
community 6
strategic 6
personal 9
Scored daily by a customisable AI persona to surface the most relevant engineering leadership news.
Practical MCP server design patterns from experience, highly actionable for building agent tools.
Summary
Building production-grade MCP servers requires minimizing tool count to preserve context window, using resources instead of tools for reads, and failing closed on auth but open on rate limits. Key practices include annotating tools with safety hints, implementing optimistic concurrency for writes, enforcing read-only defaults with audit logging for sensitive data, and providing server instructions to guide agent behavior. These patterns separate reliable servers from demos that break under real agent usage.