An MCPThe Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.Full definition → server tells an AI application which tools it offers and what information each tool needs. The client can request that catalog, select a tool and send arguments through a standard protocol. The MCP specification defines both discovery and invocation, making the connection more concrete than a general promise to give AI access to data.
Fly.io draws a useful design implication in its explainer: a tool can represent a complete workflow that combines several API calls. Developers therefore need to decide which useful operations to expose, even when the underlying service already has an API.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.
LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
agent skill — A reusable instruction file that teaches an agent how to do one job well — the procedure, the tools, and what counts as done.
