an intro to mcp for busy devs

Takeaways

Allen Thomas TL;DR: MCP server : LLM :: LSP : text editor; MCP is “ODBC for AI”—one protocol instead of per-LLM tool connectors.
Motivating example: Claude can’t answer Pokémon #1000 without tools despite knowledge cutoff; PokéAPI MCP gives live lookup.
Practical setup: Python + uv (prefer brew install uv over install script for Claude Desktop PATH), mcp[cli], httpx, FastMCP decorator for tools.
Walkthrough builds async PokéAPI fetch helper and @mcp.tool() handlers; demonstrates why external data needs structured tool access.

Accessible hands-on MCP primer; good onboarding doc alongside Kent Dodds EpicAI MCP focus and vault .cursor/mcp.json (QMD, Raindrop) setup.

Any vault-specific MCP servers worth a similar “busy dev” walkthrough (e.g. vault-health, kb-triage)?