Season 9: Autonomous Systems & Agent Engineering · Episode 2 of 8
The Universal Connector
You play: Agent Systems Engineer
Included with Core programme and Certification prep
The situation
Following the runaway bot incident, Leo wants to connect NexusBot to six different internal and partner services: PostgreSQL creator orders, Stripe payouts, GitHub releases, Slack alerts, and external media storage. He began writing custom Python API wrappers for each service, resulting in brittle spaghetti code and hardcoded admin database passwords. Maya steps in to introduce the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—the open standard created by Anthropic and adopted across Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor. Amara and Kabelo guide the learner through building native MCP servers, managing resources versus tools, and aggregating community ecosystem adapters like Seedance for workflow orchestration and Nano Banana for edge media processing.
What you'll learn
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) architecture: host applications, protocol clients, and decoupled servers communicating over JSON-RPC 2.0.
- MCP Server development: implementing schema discovery (tools/list), execution dispatch (tools/call), and declarative URI resources (resources/list, resources/read).
- Tool aggregation: prefix and route tools from fictional server fixtures through a controlled catalog; validate registrations and enforce permissions separately.
- Context retrieval: read resource excerpts on demand, distinguish character limits from whole-request token limits, and review update/subscription support and freshness.
Who you work with
Maya Chen
Senior AI Engineer · Your mentor
Priya Naidoo
Cloud Architect
Amara Okafor
ML and Data Engineer
Lydia Roe
Security Engineer
Kabelo Mokoena
Platform and DevOps Engineer
Leo Martins
Product Manager
8-BIT
Code Nexus Internal AI Assistant
Scenes
- 1.The Spaghetti Connector Crisis
- 2.The JSON-RPC 2.0 Protocol Engine
- 3.Building an MCP Server: Tools and Resources
- 4.The MCP Ecosystem: Seedance and Nano Banana
- 5.Dynamic Context Injection & Token Budgeting
- 6.Mission Debrief: Standardized Enterprise MCP Baseline
What you leave with
You implemented selected MCP-shaped JSON-RPC handlers, tool and resource fixtures, a namespaced mock catalog and a context resolver. This is not a complete MCP server or live vendor integration. The seedance and nano_banana names are fixture aliases; character truncation is not an exact whole-request token budget, and subprocesses are not automatically sandboxed.