--- schema: 1 type: video title: MCP = Mega Context Problem - Matt Carey description: >- The best MCP server is the one you didn't have to build. At Cloudflare we have a lot of products. Our REST OpenAPI spec is over 2.3 million tokens. When teams started building MCP servers, they did what everyone does: cherry-picked important endpoints for their product, wrote some tool definitions and shipped a separate service that covered a small fraction of their API. This was driven by a fundamental context limit of the end users' agent. And tools use a bunch of context just to describe themselves. MCP felt like a Mega Context Problem (and a separate service to maintain). I think we got it all wrong. The context limit is not an MCP problem. It's an agent problem. Tools should probably be discovered on demand and clients are coming around to this. But maybe we can also do it on the server? CLIs get this for free, self-discoverable and documented by design. APIs just need a little help. This talk will cover some of the techniques we've been exploring at Cloudflare, such as codemode and tool search, to make complete APIs accessible to agents through MCP. I'll also cover some of the work we are doing with the MCP Typescript SDK to make stateless servers the default. Speaker info: - https://github.com/mattzcarey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattzcarey/ - https://x.com/mattzcarey --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/YBYUvGOuotE-mcp-mega-context-problem-matt-carey Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE' markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE.md' llms: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE/llms.txt' parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T14:56:20.861Z' language: null children: [] videoId: YBYUvGOuotE durationSeconds: 1362 publishedAt: '2026-04-25T17:00:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 27 endSeconds: 113 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=27' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 124 endSeconds: 246 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=124' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 124 endSeconds: 246 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=124' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 124 endSeconds: 246 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=124' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 246 endSeconds: 256 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=246' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 256 endSeconds: 367 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=256' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 256 endSeconds: 367 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=256' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 367 endSeconds: 378 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=367' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 367 endSeconds: 378 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=367' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 378 endSeconds: 478 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=378' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 378 endSeconds: 478 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=378' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 489 endSeconds: 576 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=489' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 576 endSeconds: 586 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=576' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 586 endSeconds: 675 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=586' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 675 endSeconds: 685 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=675' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 685 endSeconds: 808 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=685' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 685 endSeconds: 808 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=685' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 808 endSeconds: 818 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=808' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 818 endSeconds: 910 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=818' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 921 endSeconds: 1029 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=921' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 921 endSeconds: 1029 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=921' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 1029 endSeconds: 1040 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1029' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 22 text: null startSeconds: 1040 endSeconds: 1128 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1040' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 23 text: null startSeconds: 1128 endSeconds: 1138 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1128' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 24 text: null startSeconds: 1138 endSeconds: 1273 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1138' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 25 text: null startSeconds: 1138 endSeconds: 1273 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1138' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 26 text: null startSeconds: 1273 endSeconds: 1283 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1273' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 27 text: null startSeconds: 1283 endSeconds: 1362 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE?t=1283' heldReason: rights --- # MCP = Mega Context Problem - Matt Carey The best MCP server is the one you didn't have to build. At Cloudflare we have a lot of products. Our REST OpenAPI spec is over 2.3 million tokens. When teams started building MCP servers, they did what everyone does: cherry-picked important endpoints for their product, wrote some tool definitions and shipped a separate service that covered a small fraction of their API. This was driven by a fundamental context limit of the end users' agent. And tools use a bunch of context just to describe themselves. MCP felt like a Mega Context Problem (and a separate service to maintain). I think we got it all wrong. The context limit is not an MCP problem. It's an agent problem. Tools should probably be discovered on demand and clients are coming around to this. But maybe we can also do it on the server? CLIs get this for free, self-discoverable and documented by design. APIs just need a little help. This talk will cover some of the techniques we've been exploring at Cloudflare, such as codemode and tool search, to make complete APIs accessible to agents through MCP. I'll also cover some of the work we are doing with the MCP Typescript SDK to make stateless servers the default. Speaker info: - https://github.com/mattzcarey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattzcarey/ - https://x.com/mattzcarey --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/YBYUvGOuotE-mcp-mega-context-problem-matt-carey Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney --- Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/watch/YBYUvGOuotE · Channel: [AI Engineer](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md) > Search chunk text is held until public-source provenance is verified. ## Document chunks > Missing: no stored document chunks are available.