MCP Server Collection

A Model Context Protocol server is the adapter between a language model and a real system. Writing one against a documented REST API is straightforward. The ones worth talking about are the systems that never intended to be automated.

The pattern I keep reaching for on those: find the state on disk, drive the interface from live geometry rather than hardcoded coordinates, and fail loudly rather than pretending an action succeeded. One of these automates a desktop application with no API by reading its local files for state and driving its UI from the window position at runtime.

The one I am most willing to defend in an interview is the one where my first approach was wrong. I went deep into a Chromium LevelDB store intending to write to it directly, found that its custom comparator makes it effectively unwritable by outside tooling, killed my own approach, and shipped file reads plus coordinate-driven UI automation instead.