AI Engineering/Phase 13/Lesson 07

Building an MCP Server — Python + TypeScript SDKs

Most MCP tutorials show only stdio hello-worlds. A real server exposes tools plus resources plus prompts, handles capability negotiation, emits structured errors, and works the same across SDKs. This lesson builds a notes server end-to-end: stdlib stdio transport, JSON-RPC dispatch, the three server primitives, and a pure-function style that drops into either the Python SDK's FastMCP or the TypeScript SDK when you graduate.

Build 1.3 hr Python (stdlib, stdio MCP server)

Prerequisites: Phase 13 · 06 (MCP fundamentals)

#Learning Objectives

Implement initialize, tools/list, tools/call, resources/list, resources/read, prompts/list, and prompts/get methods.
Write a dispatch loop that reads JSON-RPC messages from stdin and writes responses to stdout.
Emit structured error responses per the JSON-RPC 2.0 spec and MCP's additional codes.
Graduate a stdlib implementation to FastMCP (Python SDK) or the TypeScript SDK without rewriting tool logic.

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The text and code of this lesson are based on AI Engineering from Scratch by Rohit Ghumare, MIT licensed.