Thinking out loud about AI, architecture, and building things that work
Research, case studies, and notes from the work.
Deterministic vs. Interpretive MCP Servers: Speaking the Same Language
MCP isn’t just about exposing tools. It’s about creating an efficient and effective understanding of a server in the eye of the ClientAI. This communication is guided by the manifest and, by extension, the initialization and tool calls. For simplicity, we’ll use “manifest” to represent that entire package. In effect, the manifest becomes the dictionary of the language between server and AI.
Case Study: How a Single Manifest Change Boosted LLM Accuracy from 33% to 83% in a Key Use Category
## The Challenge We were testing a simple MCP todo server with three tools: createTodo, listTodos, and a completion tool. The original completion tool was named completeTodo with the bare description: “Mark a todo item as completed.”
Potential and Pitfalls: Security Lessons from Real-World MCP Tools
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem has exploded. In just months, developers have published hundreds of servers and thousands of tools. It’s a remarkable show of creativity: everything from lightweight utilities that return the time of day to heavyweight servers that can administer databases, manage cloud infrastructure, or even control a computer.
MCP Tool Distribution
We analyzed 1,945 tools across 238 servers in the MCP Registry to understand how tools are distributed.
MCP Tool Research
This week, we’re launching a new phase of research at Lyr3: digging into the tools that power the MCP ecosystem. So far: - We’ve collected data on > 420 MCP servers. - Across ~300 of them, we’ve identified 1,400+ distinct tools, tool descriptions and inputs.
Link: You are Doing MCP Wrong
Good read of what MCP is and is not from Jim Clark at Docker. link.
MCP Registry
Lyr3.com is happy to present its MCP Registry as a beta.
NEWS: MCP Continues Reach Growth - Sept 9
MCP continues to expand its reach across enterprise and developer ecosystems, with new use cases, platform adoption, and benchmarks revealing both promise and challenges.
Do We Need Embeddable UIs in MCP?
Chat boxes have become the face of AI. We type, the AI replies, and when tools are connected through MCP (Model Context Protocol), the outputs are poured back into text. Clean, minimal plumbing. But MCP-Universe, a benchmarking project, shows just how brittle that model is. Only about one-third of complex interactions succeed when the AI has to juggle multi-step orchestration entirely through chat. That raises a question: are we overloading the AI, and forcing the chat box to do too much?
MCPs: The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games of Enterprise AI
When people hear “Model Context Protocol (MCP),” it sounds abstract and technical—like plumbing for AI systems. But if you strip it down, MCPs are really just goal-oriented choose-your-own-adventure games written for AI.
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