#mcp

20 resources and 18 guides tagged #mcp on ChangeGamer.

Finding and Evaluating MCP Servers · Guide
How to discover, assess and safely integrate MCP servers into agent pipelines.
Agentic Security Checklist · Guide
Cross-vendor, threat-surface-organized security checklist for building and operating AI agents — synthesizing OWASP, NIST, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google SAIF, and MITRE ATLAS.
MCP vs A2A: Two Protocols, Two Roles · Guide
Compact comparison of the Model Context Protocol (agent↔tool) and the Agent2Agent Protocol (agent↔agent): purpose, topology, transport, discovery, auth, governance, and when to use each.
MCP Server Authentication: OAuth 2.1 for Remote Servers · Reference
How OAuth 2.1 works for remote MCP servers: transport differences, Protected Resource Metadata discovery, PKCE, Resource Indicators, and token-audience security — with a step-by-step client flow and honest notes on what ChangeGamer's own /mcp endpoint does.
AI Agent Frameworks Compared · Reference
Vendor-neutral comparison table of the major agent-orchestration frameworks — language, license, multi-agent model, MCP/A2A support — plus a how-to-choose guide for agent builders.
Web Data and Scraping for Agents · Reference
Tool landscape for agent web-data pipelines: reader/URL-to-Markdown APIs, crawl/scrape services, and search APIs — with MCP exposure, OSS/SaaS classification, and practical guidance.
MCP Primitives: Resources, Prompts, Sampling, and Elicitation · Reference
Deep reference on the six MCP capability primitives beyond tools — who controls each, the exact JSON-RPC method names, and when to use Resources vs Tools — verified against the 2025-06-18 and 2025-11-25 spec revisions.
Building an MCP Server · Guide
Implementation guide for MCP servers: architecture roles, the three server primitives, stdio vs Streamable HTTP transports, official SDKs, server lifecycle, remote-server concerns, testing with MCP Inspector, and publishing to the official registry.
MCP vs Function Calling: When to Use Which · Reference
Direct comparison of provider-native function/tool calling and the Model Context Protocol — architecture, decision criteria, and how they compose.
MCP Apps Explained: The Official Interactive-UI Extension for MCP · Reference
What MCP Apps (SEP-1865) is: the ui:// resource scheme and sandboxed-iframe/JSON-RPC bridge it defines for MCP tools to return rendered UI instead of plain text, how it relates to the community MCP-UI project and OpenAI's Apps SDK, and which hosts support it.
MCP Goes Stateless: The 2026-07-28 Spec Revision Explained · Reference
What changes in MCP's largest revision since launch: SEP-2575/SEP-2567 remove the session handshake and Mcp-Session-Id header for explicit state handles, new Mcp-Method/Mcp-Name routing headers, full JSON Schema 2020-12 tool schemas, and six authorization-hardening SEPs — shipped as final, on schedule, on 2026-07-28.
NLWeb Explained: Microsoft's Natural-Language Query Protocol for Websites · Reference
What NLWeb is: the open, MIT-licensed protocol that lets a site answer natural-language questions over its own Schema.org data via /ask and /mcp endpoints, who built it, and how it differs from llms.txt, AGENTS.md, and a generic MCP server.
AI Supply Chain Provenance: SBOMs, SLSA, and Artifact Signing for Agents and MCP Servers · Reference
How CycloneDX AI/ML-BOM, SPDX AI profiles, SLSA build levels, and in-toto/Sigstore signing let an agent check what is actually inside a model, package, or MCP server — and how it was built — before trusting it.
WebMCP: Browser-Native Tool Registration for In-Page AI Agents · Reference
What WebMCP is: the W3C Web Machine Learning Community Group browser API letting a page register its own tools (via document.modelContext or plain HTML forms) for an in-browser agent to call directly, the live Chrome and Edge origin trials, and how it differs from MCP itself.
The Claude Agent SDK: Building Custom Agents on the Claude Code Harness · Reference
What the Claude Agent SDK is: Anthropic's Python/TypeScript library exposing the same agent loop, tools, and context management that power Claude Code, how it differs from the raw Client SDK, the Claude Code CLI, and Managed Agents, plus its auth, licensing, and billing rules.
MCP Enterprise-Managed Authorization: Zero-Touch SSO via ID-JAG (SEP-990) · Reference
What Enterprise-Managed Authorization is: the MCP extension (SEP-990) that lets an IdP grant MCP server access during SSO instead of a per-server OAuth consent screen — the ID-JAG mechanism, the RFCs it builds on, and how it layers on standard MCP OAuth 2.1.
MCP Registry: server.json, Namespaces, and Publishing · Reference
How the official MCP Registry (registry.modelcontextprotocol.io) works: publishing with mcp-publisher, the server.json manifest, io.github.<owner>/<name> namespaces, and how aggregators mirror it — with ChangeGamer's own registry listing as a worked example.
Agent Plugins Explained: The plugin.json Packaging Standard · Reference
How the Agent Plugins Specification v1.0.0 packages Agent Skills and MCP server configs into one portable, plugin.json-manifested directory — the manifest fields, the two component types, and who governs the spec.
MCP Tasks Extension: Polling for Long-Running Tool Calls (SEP-2663) · Reference
What the MCP Tasks extension is: the official io.modelcontextprotocol/tasks mechanism that lets a server return a pollable task handle instead of blocking on a slow tools/call — tasks/get, tasks/update, tasks/cancel, the five task states, and how it differs from the removed 2025-11-25 experimental tasks feature.
MCP Tool Poisoning: Definition, Attack Variants, and Defenses · Guide
MCP tool poisoning is an attack where the tool metadata an agent reads (descriptions, schemas) carries hostile instructions or altered contracts. Definition, OWASP MCP03 mapping, what the MCP spec requires of clients, and a pin-scan-confirm defense checklist.

Guides

Running an MCP Server as a Distribution Channel for Your Content · guide
Why a content site should expose an MCP server, which tools to ship, how discovery and authentication work, how to gate paid tools, and the honest limits of the channel.
How Do AI Agents Discover Paid APIs? A Guide to Every Surface · guide
How an AI agent finds out a paid API or resource exists before it ever reads a price: llms.txt, the JSON API index, MCP registries, incidental 402 discovery, x402 auto-listing, and what .well-known does and does not cover.
MCP Authentication and the Production MCP Server Playbook · pillar guide
MCP authentication with OAuth 2.1, plus transport, tool design, versioning, testing, distribution and observability for a production MCP server.
stdio vs. Streamable HTTP for MCP Servers: A Decision Framework · guide
Which MCP transport to build against and why: the single-client-vs-shared decision rule, how state works without a session handshake under the 2026-07-28 spec, the auth-model switching cost, and what actually breaks migrating off HTTP+SSE.
How to Implement OAuth 2.1 for an MCP Server · guide
A wire-level implementation walkthrough for OAuth 2.1 on a remote MCP server: what the discovery documents actually contain, CIMD vs. Dynamic Client Registration in your server code, per-SEP detail from the 2026-07-28 hardening set, and token-validation mechanics.
Defending MCP Clients Against Tool Description and Output Injection · guide
Two distinct MCP injection surfaces — a tool description at connect-time and a tool's return value at call-time — and the client-side architectural patterns (Dual LLM, Action-Selector, Context-Minimization) that contain each one.
How to Test an MCP Server in CI · guide
The implementation mechanics below the three-layer test pyramid: what a mocked MCP transport actually replaces, what a Streamable HTTP cassette contains, a concrete CI job/trigger shape, and how to catch spec-version drift before it reaches production.
MCP Server Versioning and Spec Migration: An Operator Playbook · guide
A migration runbook for MCP server operators: feature-detecting via capabilities instead of hard protocolVersion branching, a dual-version fleet rollout with rollback triggers, a compatibility shim for legacy clients still sending initialize, and a deprecation calendar built off the 12-month SEP-2577 floor.
MCP Server Observability with OpenTelemetry: Spans, Metrics, and Trace Correlation · guide
Instrumenting an MCP server past the pillar's baseline: what to put on a tool-call span beyond gen_ai.tool.name, what replaces the deprecated Logging primitive in practice, per-tool-name latency and error-rate metrics, and how a trace ID actually survives the agent-to-upstream-API hop.
How to Publish an MCP Server to the Official Registry · guide
A step-by-step walkthrough of the mcp-publisher CLI and the server.json manifest for publishing an MCP server to registry.modelcontextprotocol.io, how to republish after a version bump, and how the registry relates to aggregators, marketplaces, and direct distribution.
MCP Server Cost Optimization: Toolset Size, Caching Hints, and Fan-Out · guide
How the token cost of an MCP server's tool list, the 2026-07-28 spec's ttlMs/cacheScope caching hints, fan-out from callers you do not control, and per-tool-name cost visibility each shape what a production MCP server actually costs to run.
Common MCP Server Failure Modes and How to Fix Them · guide
A runtime playbook for the two MCP server failure modes with no dedicated deep-dive elsewhere: unrecoverable state after a mid-call crash, and malformed or hallucinated tool calls that reach the handler despite upstream validation.
MCP Tools vs Resources vs Prompts: How to Choose the Right Primitive · guide
A decision procedure for MCP's three server-side primitives — who controls each one, a worked example of what it costs to expose a Resource as a Tool by mistake, and how Sampling and Elicitation fit as the client-side counterparts.
The MCP Server Production Launch Checklist · guide
A phase-by-phase go/no-go checklist for launching an MCP server: checkable gate conditions for transport and auth, tool design, cross-client testing, publish readiness, observability, and ongoing operation — with links to the mechanics each gate depends on.
Zero-Touch Enterprise Authorization for MCP Servers: ID-JAG and SEP-990 · guide
How Enterprise-Managed Authorization (SEP-990) removes the per-server OAuth consent screen for MCP servers: the ID-JAG grant mechanism, its RFC 8693/7523 building blocks, named launch adopters as of August 2026, and how it layers on top of standard OAuth 2.1 rather than replacing it.
How to Manage Secrets for AI Agents in Production · guide
Why single-agent credential issuance is not the whole secrets problem: auditing which tool servers and MCP connectors hold credentials on an agent's behalf, treating provider-side prompt caches as a disclosure surface, and the named frameworks — OWASP's Secrets Management Cheat Sheet, Twelve-Factor config, and the OWASP GenAI project — that govern the rest.
How to Verify Supply-Chain Provenance for AI Agent Dependencies · guide
An operational playbook for three separate trust-boundary gates — package-install time, model-load time, and MCP-server-connect time — that turns SBOM and attestation formats into checks a pipeline can actually run, plus a fail-closed default for the dependency that carries neither.
How to Respond When an AI Agent Takes a Harmful Action · guide
Why the pillar's cut-credential, stop-instance, export-evidence order is structurally forced rather than a tidy convention, a concrete answer for who holds standing revocation authority, a pre-incident drill for the evidence-export path, and what changes when the compromised credential belongs to a third-party tool server instead of the agent itself.