I have about thirty Actors on the Apify Store. Making one of them available to an AI agent through the Apify MCP server took me two minutes: add ?actors=lergassy/jobs-api to the server URL and the Actor shows up as a tool. That part is a footnote.
The useful part was what came back. I spent an afternoon calling my own Actor the way an agent calls it — raw JSON-RPC over the wire, no client in between — and logging every response. Four things surprised me, and three of them changed how I write input schemas.
The Actor here is Jobs API: job listings from Indeed, LinkedIn and company career boards in one schema. Nothing about what follows is specific to jobs, though. If your Actor has more than three inputs, the same things will happen to you.
Talking to the server without a client
Every walkthrough I found used Claude Desktop or Cursor. I wanted the traffic, not a chat transcript, so I used curl. The Apify MCP server speaks streamable HTTP: you POST JSON-RPC, you get back server-sent events.
