Building 60 MCP Servers Using the Five Elements Framework: A Build-in-Public Journey
Most people focus on adding more features to their AI agents. I discovered better evaluation loops matter more.
Over the past several months, my team and I have been building tancoai.com — a platform hosting 60+ MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and Skills. What started as "let's build a few useful AI tools" turned into a deep exploration of what makes a Skill actually reliable in production.
Along the way, we developed something we call the Five Elements Framework (连珠五环). It's not a library or a package — it's a way of thinking about Skill design that forced us to stop adding features blindly and start measuring whether what we built actually worked.
This article is an honest account of what happened when we applied this framework across 60+ servers. Including the parts where it didn't go well.
