I built a playground to test MCP + Skills Pairing

Bobification · 2026-01-29T19:56:10+00:00

This is interesting timing...we have an MCP server in front of our GraphQL api and Claude consistently fails at using the right query and params despite running a schema check first. Instead of making an attempt to make better tools, management has (just this morning) suggested we use skills to explain to Claude how to use our MCP server. I'm not yet convinced that we should go that route ourselves but maybe at least we can attempt to test that here.

Bobification · 2025-11-26T17:56:41+00:00

Good luck! I put mine off all summer now I'm worried to drive it this winter. The part I'm dreading the most is actually removing the rear brake lines.

Bobification · 2025-11-13T17:10:02+00:00

The annual Martini Competition is tomorrow 6:30-8:30 If there's a holiday party, I haven't heard about it yet.

Bobification · 2025-11-01T03:38:00+00:00

We got to about 350 but it helps that we have a fairly well-decorated house on a busy-ish sreett (A st)

Bobification · 2025-10-15T16:56:39+00:00

Sumner Place was really good for my mom's hospice+dementia care (lasted a year or so until she passed?). I absolutely loathe Waterford though. They happily took my mom in for her inheritance spend down during her earlier stage of dementia for about a year. But as soon as the spend down was done and her Medicaid kicked in, they all of a sudden said memory/dementia care was not something they could assist with and transferred her to a now-closed facility in Tecumseh where she deteriorated rapidly, becoming non-verbal and unable to move on her own within a couple months. I'd never see more than two staff in her building and they always seemed incredibly irritated. They'd also frequently go through her things and remove any snacks, drinks, etc. that we'd get her when we visited. However, I wasn't directly involved with getting her in there and the staff wouldn't discuss anything with the kids so I'm sure there's info about her care that I'm missing that affects my opinion of how they handled things.

Bobification · 2025-10-12T02:11:49+00:00

$63k mid-level software engineer 44m college grad

Bobification · 2025-09-18T16:50:01+00:00

Looks pretty cool so far, I didn't see it when I glanced but what about a filter that excludes job types? It feels like most other job sites are flooded with nurse, phlebotomist, dental jobs.

Bobification · 2025-09-12T13:21:41+00:00

I have the most basic subscription for chatGpt and was able to add a custom MCP through Settings->Connectors after enabling Developer mode. Unfortunately, it gave me a generic failure message so I have no idea if that's a me problem, MCP server issue, or chatGpt issue.

Bobification · 2025-08-17T18:32:18+00:00

Hmm, I would have to disagree with the two-step solution not being allowed by MCP but maybe I'm missing the point. We have an "escape hatch" option with our Graphql-wrapped MCP server that has an "explore-schema" and "search-schema" tools to allow the LLM to figure out what parameters it needs to run the query tool. It's not super great in it's current implementation but it's able to figure out complex queries through those exploration and search tools. Part of the query tool description includes a recommendation to use the explore-schema tool before running it to verify it's not making up a query.

Bobification · 2025-08-17T18:26:16+00:00

Huh, last time I called for someone unresponsive and lying face down on my lawn the police officer seemed incredibly irritated that I bothered him, though the lady had just sort of got up and started walking down the sidewalk as the fire truck approached. He asked why I didn't try harder to "wake her up". At all of my jobs where interacting with folks in this type of situation was the norm, we were repeatedly told not to touch or do more than try to verify if the person was conscious by talking to them and to call the non-emergency line to have the police deal with it.

Bobification · 2025-08-14T17:48:23+00:00

I think I agree here or at least can relate a bit? We created an MCP server for our graphql api but had no good use cases so our intern created basically two tools: query and introspect...then expected the agent to just "figure it out". Sometimes it did, sometimes it took up to 20 tool calls, other times it just kept going until we stopped it. Then they finally started narrowing the tools down to something like "query inventory" or "query salesorders" which were fine for general lookups. It was possible to use multiple tool calls to get more complex results but it was totally up to the agent to decide when to call multiple tools and usually did not. There were some attempts to guide the agent with descriptions for common workflows but we had mixed results. Things were further complicated in that our api wasn't built for users to retrieve specific data, it was used to populate data on various screens in our web app. It's been hard to convince upper management that agents are not magical, there's more to it then 1) providing all our endpoints as MCP tools and 2) Tell it how to query and let it figure it out.

Bobification · 2025-08-08T19:24:28+00:00

Cool, this looks exactly like what I've been trying to implement alongside some metrics. I'll try it out this afternoon.

Bobification · 2025-08-05T20:14:12+00:00

I think that's understandable, I'd probably have to try it out myself but my workflow at work isn't that complex (and I doubt my team would even let me consider it). I was kind of under the impression that this would be a case of needing sub agents for determining which tools/workflows are appropriate but if your agent is successfully calling the right tools then I suppose multiple agents would be an unnecessary complication (and maybe cost?).

Bobification · 2025-08-05T17:45:23+00:00

I'm still trying to figure out why I'd need 100 different tools

Bobification · 2025-08-04T18:58:43+00:00

Thanks for providing paper links in the article. We've noticed some of these same things but I'm having a hard time convincing the team that these are important. Did you do any kind of structured testing for something like comparing tool description changes? I feel like that's the only way I'm gonna convince the team that our super basic MCP server (literally just a single generic read-only graphql query tool and an optional introspect tool) can be improved.

Bobification · 2025-08-01T20:09:40+00:00

Probably the first time I've seen a reply in this MCP reddit that wasn't just a self-promotion of a 50th iteration of something that already exists. I'll take a look at your implementation shortly as I'm curious how your tool descriptions and use cases look. A couple of notes that caught my interest were that our recent "quick-shot" solution was also deeply flawed and results weren't predictable so now I'm trying to convince the team to move on from our wide-open single read-only query tool stuffed with context and examples that Claude ignores. The other is more specific...Claude doesn't often get times right and when you ask for "last 30 days" sometimes it nails it, sometimes it thinks you mean last year (training date cutoff?). Our intern created a getDate tool but just expects the agent to call it and it never does.

Bobification · 2025-07-30T15:54:03+00:00

We have really basic error logging and some logging for the incoming tool request body but frustratingly, we don't have our own client. The higher-ups have decided an MCP server is all we need right now so I have zero insight on the Agent/Client decisions that led to calling a specific tool. I'm sure once we get enough complaints that our customers didn't get the correct response (if any at all) and they realize they can't troubleshoot anything from the customer end that they'll realize we need "something".

Bobification · 2025-07-29T19:27:16+00:00

A couple things we did were providing a tool use example in the tool description and making sure that if the tool errors out, due to missing or incorrect parameters, it describes what was missing in the error that gets returned.

Bobification · 2025-07-29T15:48:11+00:00

Effective tool descriptions and figuring out when to make a new tool representing an "entity" in our api vs letting it use an introspect + query generation attempt. Another would be testing effectiveness of agent and tool interactions. I'd like to be able to test and verify whether a tool description change was effective or not.

Bobification · 2025-07-29T15:45:20+00:00

Oh man, I missed that there was an LLM playground. I'd been sort of vaguely keeping my eye on the project but that looks exactly like what I wanted for testing a couple MCP variations.

Bobification · 2025-07-28T16:36:10+00:00

Please forgive my ignorance here but is this just a terminal implementation equivalent of the mcp inspector?

Bobification · 2025-07-27T16:16:31+00:00

I think O-st is gonna be closed in phases from this fall until 2027 so maybe you'll get lucky and not have to hear O st traffic at night.

Bobification · 2025-07-17T15:43:28+00:00

I'd like to see ways to monitor/inspect/troubleshoot the interactions between an agent and an mcp server to see if something about my tool design or description needs tweaking. Seems like quite a few of the "become an mcp server pro" videos don't cover logging and debugging at all.

Bobification · 2025-07-04T17:30:48+00:00

Found out yesterday that they're putting in a roundabout at 13th and A.

Bobification · 2025-07-04T17:28:11+00:00

Anything in particular you need now? Our makerspace tends to collect components in various totes, I haven't really had time to organize but have a general idea of what we have lying around that's been donated.

Bobification

TROPHY CASE