MCP Server Development

Workflow

1. Confirm target protocol revision/client compatibility before depending on optional features.
2. Choose primitives deliberately: tools for model-invoked actions, resources for application-managed context, prompts for user-selected templates.
3. Choose stdio for local process integration or Streamable HTTP for remote HTTP transport unless a client imposes different constraints.
4. Design narrow schemas, validate arguments at runtime, paginate large collections and make write semantics explicit/idempotent.
5. For HTTP authorization, follow MCP authorization discovery/resource-binding requirements and validate token audience; never pass upstream tokens through blindly.
6. Treat server/tool/resource content as untrusted and preserve user consent around actions/data access.
7. Test capability negotiation, malformed requests, auth failure, cancellation, pagination and side-effect retries.

Conditional references

• Primitive choice and control model → references/primitives.md.
• Transport/lifecycle → references/transports.md.
• HTTP authorization → references/authorization.md.
• Security/trust boundaries → references/security.md.

Asset

Use assets/implementation-checklist.md during review/handoff.