Exposing a tool to an agent over MCP takes ten minutes. Building an MCP server that survives a model you don't control, on a tight token budget with limited thinking time, is the part nobody warns you about.
We learned the difference shipping our own, consumed by third-party agents whose models we don't pick. Three principles came out of it, each one we only fully believed after it broke in production:
TL;DR — three MCP server best practices from our trenches:
Fewer tools, narrower surface. Consolidate around the workflow, not the underlying API.
Consistent verbiage everywhere. Same name for the same concept across every input, output, and value on the server.
