AI Engineering/Phase 13/Lesson 10

MCP Resources and Prompts — Context Exposure Beyond Tools

Tools get 90 percent of MCP attention. The other two server primitives solve different problems. Resources expose data for reading; prompts expose reusable templates as slash-commands. Many servers should use resources instead of wrapping reads in tools, and prompts instead of hard-coding workflows in client prompts. This lesson names the decision rule and walks the `resources/*` and `prompts/*` messages.

Build 45 min Python (stdlib, resource + prompt handler)

Prerequisites: Phase 13 · 07 (MCP server)

#Learning Objectives

Decide between exposing a capability as a tool, a resource, or a prompt for a given domain.
Implement resources/list, resources/read, resources/subscribe and handle notifications/resources/updated.
Implement prompts/list and prompts/get with argument templates.
Recognize when the host surfaces prompts as slash-commands vs auto-injected context.

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