Most MCP demos stop at hello world. Then you try to wrap a real system at work and hit everything the tutorials skip: authentication, secret handling, deciding which actions an agent may take, and what happens when a tool call fails.
This session closes that gap. Starting from an empty editor, I'll build an MCP server live with FastMCP in Python, wrapping a small FastAPI service that stands in for an internal company API, then harden it into something you'd actually deploy. We'll cover authenticating the server, keeping secrets out of the model's reach, scoping dangerous actions so an agent can read without being able to delete, and handling failures so one broken call doesn't derail the agent. We'll test it live with MCP Inspector.
You'll leave with a clear mental model and a practical checklist for exposing your own systems to agents over MCP. The patterns are shown in Python with FastMCP and portable to any official MCP SDK.