Here's Rhys' practical guide to shipping an MCP your users want:
- Your MCP should be able to do everything your dashboard can
Yes including things like deleting resources. The way to make this practical inside of an agent while not having things be unsafe is to deep link them into your product from inside the MCP
- Do not ship lazy loading / codemode inside of your MCP
CodeMode is a harness detail. Most harnesses (Claude / Codex / OpenCode) support codemode now, the problem is if you have two codemode MCPs they don't compose nicely (Executor v2 will still support CodeMode, but, will start to default to a transparent tool proxy for better clients)
- Ship a search docs / skills tool
Agents love these and it helps give them more understanding of your product
MCP is getting skills over mcp which will help here in the future
- Have a deep link into product tool
Let the agent generate a URL that brings them into your product, people still want to use your dashboard and data visualization! They just don't want to click through things
- Customization
I think this matters less over time, but, you can allow people to select 'toolsets' of things to connect with to clients. Some clients don't support customizing tool selections and then it's also nice to have tool permissions set to the auth token
- Let people OAuth from whatever client they want
Please stop putting restrictions on which clients can authenticate to MCP servers, your users hate it, it doesn't improve security, all it does is add more friction
PostHog and Sentry are my two 'AI native' companies to look at today, they both have an excellent onboarding, MCP / CLI experience, if you need a place to learn from look at them
To be honest though, while all the above is helpful just shipping your API spec + CIMD OAuth to it is enough for 99% of agents to have a good experience
When using an MCP:
1. What makes for a great experience?
2. What are examples of good MCP experiences?