Teaching an LLM to pull MCP Resources and Prompts on demand (instead of drowning it in context)

Teaching an LLM to pull MCP Resources and Prompts on demand (instead of drowning it in context)

How we wired the Model Context Protocol's "application-controlled" primitives into a model-controlled tool-calling loop — and why that small shift changes everything about context hygiene.

TL;DR

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) gives a server three ways to expose capability: tools, resources, and prompts. Tools drop straight into an LLM's function-calling loop. Resources and prompts don't — they're application-controlled, so most integrations just dump every resource's content into the system prompt and hope for the best.

That approach bloats context, truncates large documents, breaks on binary files, and gives the model zero say in what it actually needs.