Week 6: MCP, Evaluation, and LLMOps
What MCP Is and Why It Matters
MCP is a tool boundary and integration contract, not a trend checkbox.
Objective
Explain MCP as a model-to-tool boundary and when it improves an AI system design.The lesson is public. The pressure loop lives inside the app where submissions, revision, and review happen.
Deliverable
An evaluation scorecard and post-launch monitoring plan.Each lesson contributes to a week-level artifact and eventually to the shipped AI-native SaaS.
Preview
Public lesson preview.
Lesson Preview
What MCP Is and Why It Matters
MCP is a tool boundary and integration contract, not a trend checkbox.
This lesson introduces MCP as a structured way for models to interact with external capabilities through explicit contracts.
Without a clean tool boundary, model integrations become one-off hacks with inconsistent semantics, poor auditability, and weak control over capabilities.
MCP is not the product. It is the boundary layer between model reasoning and external tools or context providers. Good boundaries make systems composable and governable.
What This Is
This lesson introduces MCP as a structured way for models to interact with external capabilities through explicit contracts.
Why This Matters in Production
Without a clean tool boundary, model integrations become one-off hacks with inconsistent semantics, poor auditability, and weak control over capabilities.
Mental Model
MCP is not the product. It is the boundary layer between model reasoning and external tools or context providers. Good boundaries make systems composable and governable.
Deep Dive
The real value of MCP is not novelty. It is normalization. Tool definitions, invocation semantics, and context access become explicit instead of hidden inside custom glue code. That improves portability, makes permissions clearer, and gives you a better shot at reasoning about what a model may call and why.
Worked Example
A research assistant can call a documentation search tool, a progress API, and a roadmap generator through explicit interfaces. Each tool can be permissioned and logged independently instead of being smuggled through prompt text.
Common Failure Modes
Common failures include overexposing internal systems to tools, assuming a tool contract guarantees safe behavior, and forgetting that tool outputs can be poisoned or sensitive too.
References
Further reading the machine expects you to use properly.
official-doc
Model Context Protocol
Use the protocol docs, not social-media summaries.
Open referenceofficial-doc
Function Calling and Tools
Compare provider-native tool use with MCP-style boundaries.
Open referenceofficial-doc
Tool Calling Concepts
Useful for comparing orchestration styles.
Open reference