MCP is a connective tissue from agents to tools, but for many it still feels abstract, magical, or hidden behind SDKs.

This talk strips MCP down to first principles.

Rather than starting with a framework, we'll walk through the journey of building an MCP server from scratch over stdio and JSON-RPC. We'll follow the protocol exactly as it exists, showing how agents discover tools, negotiate capabilities, and invoke real work step by step.

By the end of this session, MCP will no longer feel like a black box. You will understand how transports, JSON-RPC, initialization, tool discovery, and invocation work together on a local machine and how to architect your own MCP tools with confidence.