MCP Server Patterns#

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is Anthropic’s open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data. Instead of every agent framework inventing its own tool integration format, MCP provides a single protocol that any agent can speak.

An agent that supports MCP can discover tools at runtime, understand their inputs and outputs, and invoke them – without hardcoded integration code for each tool.

Server Structure: Three Primitives#

An MCP server exposes three types of capabilities: