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Have you been hearing a lot of buzz around Anthropic’s MCP and other agent-focused protocols, but weren’t sure what they were — and whether they might be relevant for your projects?
You’re in the right place: in this week’s Variable, we present three accessible articles that will help you gain a deeper, hands-on understanding of this emerging cluster of tools.
Before we jump right in, a quick update for all our contributors: we’re thrilled to share that with our just-announced Stripe integration, payouts from the Author Payment Program are going to be a lot more streamlined going forward.
How I Finally Understood MCP — and Got It Working in Real Life
For anyone taking their first steps with the model context protocol, Hailey Quach’s beginner-friendly guide is the perfect place to start. It covers all the basic concepts you need to know before zooming in on what you can actually accomplish with this versatile open standard for agent-centric workflows.
How Not to Write an MCP Server
Looking for helpful pointers? Roni Dover shares several, based on the challenges he faced in his first MCP project.
ACP: The Internet Protocol for AI Agents
MCP isn’t the only game in town — Sandi Besen introduces us to the new “HTTP of agent communication.”
Other Recommended Reads
If you feel like exploring a wider set of topics this week, we invite you to read these excellent articles on AI ethics and regulation, prompt engineering, and more:
- It’s increasingly crucial to understand the environmental impact of AI model training. Ngoc Doan‘s analysis offers an in-depth look at the limitations and potential upside of hardware improvements.
- What is missing from current AI regulations? Dariusz Jemielniak argues that it’s time for a fourth law of robotics, limiting AI systems’ ability to pretend to be human.
- Children are very aware of AI’s growing footprint in our (and their) daily lives, but how should adults talk to them about it? Stephanie Kirmer shares concrete insights to help parents and educators.
- Learn the ins and outs of regression discontinuity design (RDD) — a patient deep dive by Alejandro Alvarez Perez explores how it works, how to run it, and how to get it right.
- After introducing her GPT-powered fashion assistant in an earlier article, Arielle Caron shares the lessons she’s learned about the challenges of effective prompting.
Meet Our New Authors
Don’t miss the work of some of our newest contributors:
- Zaynab Awofeso’s debut TDS article walks us through cutting-edge research on African-focused automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and the challenges of working on low-resource accents.
- Akrita Agarwal joins our community with deep expertise in software engineering at startups and tech giants alike.
- Yagmur Gulec recently published a fascinating article, outlining an innovative approach that leverages machine learning in preventive healthcare.
Contribute to TDS
We love publishing articles from new authors, so if you’ve recently written an interesting project walkthrough, tutorial, or theoretical reflection on any of our core topics, why not share it with us?
