MCP Internals: Visualizing Agent-Tool Architecture
See the Invisible
Interactive simulators visualize what's hidden from view.
Hands-On Labs
Step through executions tick by tick. Manipulate state.
Why, Not Just What
Deep architectural understanding for mid-senior developers.
AI Sandbox Lab
Real-world scenarios. Find the flaws AI misses.
Become the Engineer Who Supervises AI
As AI generates more code, understanding what that code does becomes more valuable, not less. Someone must verify AI output, debug failures, and make architectural decisions.
Build Your Architectural EdgeYou've built AI applications. But do you know how they actually talk to the outside world?
MCP is the protocol layer that connects LLMs to tools, files, databases, and APIs. This course makes the invisible visible: watch messages flow through Host-Client-Server topologies, trace capability negotiation handshakes, and debug failures at every protocol boundary.
The Integration Chaos You Know Too Well
Every AI application faces the same problem: LLMs operate in isolation. They have no persistent awareness of your file system, databases, or external APIs. So you write bespoke integration code. Every tool gets its own error handling. Every API gets its own discovery logic. Capability negotiation becomes a maze of if-statements.
When something breaks, where do you look? Is it the transport layer? The message serialization? The tool handler? The capability mismatch during initialization? Without understanding the protocol architecture, you're debugging blind.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) solves this with a standardized protocol layer. One consistent language connecting any AI application to any external capability. But reading the spec doesn't give you intuition. You need to see it work.
Interactive Simulators That Show What Specs Cannot
Watch JSON-RPC messages flow from Host to Client to Server in real time. See capability negotiation handshakes unfold step by step. Trace a tool invocation through every protocol layer. Inject failures and observe exactly how disconnections propagate. These simulators turn abstract protocol concepts into observable system behavior you can manipulate and understand.
What This Course Covers
Why LLMs need a standardized protocol to escape isolation. Where MCP sits in the application stack and why ad-hoc integrations create brittleness.
The three-actor architecture with distinct responsibilities and security boundaries. How multi-server configurations work and why Clients maintain 1:1 Server connections.
How MCP uses JSON-RPC 2.0 for requests, responses, and notifications. The structure of every message type and how method names map to protocol operations.
Tools, Resources, and Prompts: the three things MCP servers expose. When to use each, how capability negotiation works at initialization, and access patterns for each type.
Tracing messages across Host-Client-Server boundaries. Diagnosing initialization failures, capability mismatches, tool execution errors, and transport disconnections. Understanding JSON-RPC error codes and what information to collect at each layer.
Course Curriculum
16 lessons. 11 interactive labs. Every protocol concept visualized.
Visual cheatsheet
Practice verifying AI-generated code
Built for engineers who need to understand MCP at the protocol level: how capability discovery works, why the three-actor topology exists, and where to look when things break. Whether you're implementing MCP servers, debugging integration failures, or architecting multi-agent systems, this course gives you the mental model to reason about any MCP interaction from first principles.
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