Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know before you start MCP is the integration standard now. As of mid-2026 every major AI coding tool speaks it, and more than 5,000 community servers exist. Build once, plug into Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and the rest. There are only three primitives to learn — tools, resources and prompts. If you understand those, you understand MCP. Two transports matter: STDIO for local servers and Streamable HTTP for remote ones. Start local; it is far simpler. The one pitfall that breaks every beginner is writing to stdout in a STDIO server. We will call it out loudly below. A shipped MCP server is excellent proof-of-work. It is small, self-contained and demonstrably useful — exactly the kind of artefact that makes a Verified Builder profile credible. If you have ever wired…
