--- schema: 1 type: video title: 'Your MCP Server is Bad (and you should feel bad) - Jeremiah Lowin, Prefect' description: >- Too many MCP servers are simply glorified REST wrappers, regurgitating APIs that were designed for SDKs, not agents. This leads to confused LLMs, wasted tokens, and demonstrably poor performance. If you've ever pointed an MCP generator at an OpenAPI spec and called it a day, this talk is your intervention. Like any product, great MCP servers are the result of careful design. This talk shares the hard-won lessons from creating FastMCP, the most popular framework for building MCP servers (and yes, for generating them, too). The secret is to stop thinking about endpoints and start thinking about products. We will cover the three pillars of agent-native product design—Discovery, Iteration, and Context—providing an actionable framework for curating context into small, highly effective surface areas that lead to better AI outcomes. Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect https://twitter.com/jlowin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlowin https://github.com/jlowin --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/96G7FLab8xc-your-mcp-server-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad 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/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/your-mcp-server-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad-jere-ebf14d956dec markdown: >- https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer/video/your-mcp-server-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad-jere-ebf14d956dec.md llms: null parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/aidotengineer.md' channel: aidotengineer updated: '2026-10-24T16:02:53.272Z' language: null children: [] videoId: 96G7FLab8xc durationSeconds: 3273 publishedAt: '2026-01-12T18:00:06.000Z' searchChunks: - ordinal: 0 text: null startSeconds: 275 endSeconds: 387 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=275' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 1 text: null startSeconds: 397 endSeconds: 528 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=397' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 2 text: null startSeconds: 397 endSeconds: 528 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=397' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 3 text: null startSeconds: 538 endSeconds: 629 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=538' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 4 text: null startSeconds: 849 endSeconds: 979 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=849' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 5 text: null startSeconds: 849 endSeconds: 979 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=849' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 6 text: null startSeconds: 989 endSeconds: 1092 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=989' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 7 text: null startSeconds: 1103 endSeconds: 1206 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1103' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 8 text: null startSeconds: 1218 endSeconds: 1319 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1218' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 9 text: null startSeconds: 1329 endSeconds: 1459 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1329' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 10 text: null startSeconds: 1472 endSeconds: 1551 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1472' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 11 text: null startSeconds: 1562 endSeconds: 1650 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1562' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 12 text: null startSeconds: 1661 endSeconds: 1749 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1661' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 13 text: null startSeconds: 1760 endSeconds: 1865 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=1760' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 14 text: null startSeconds: 2109 endSeconds: 2220 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2109' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 15 text: null startSeconds: 2231 endSeconds: 2343 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2231' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 16 text: null startSeconds: 2354 endSeconds: 2436 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2354' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 17 text: null startSeconds: 2581 endSeconds: 2661 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2581' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 18 text: null startSeconds: 2671 endSeconds: 2771 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2671' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 19 text: null startSeconds: 2782 endSeconds: 2875 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2782' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 20 text: null startSeconds: 2888 endSeconds: 2990 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=2888' heldReason: rights - ordinal: 21 text: null startSeconds: 3148 endSeconds: 3273 watch: 'https://liquidgold.cc/watch/96G7FLab8xc?t=3148' heldReason: rights --- # Your MCP Server is Bad (and you should feel bad) - Jeremiah Lowin, Prefect Too many MCP servers are simply glorified REST wrappers, regurgitating APIs that were designed for SDKs, not agents. This leads to confused LLMs, wasted tokens, and demonstrably poor performance. If you've ever pointed an MCP generator at an OpenAPI spec and called it a day, this talk is your intervention. Like any product, great MCP servers are the result of careful design. This talk shares the hard-won lessons from creating FastMCP, the most popular framework for building MCP servers (and yes, for generating them, too). The secret is to stop thinking about endpoints and start thinking about products. We will cover the three pillars of agent-native product design—Discovery, Iteration, and Context—providing an actionable framework for curating context into small, highly effective surface areas that lead to better AI outcomes. Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect https://twitter.com/jlowin https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlowin https://github.com/jlowin --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/96G7FLab8xc-your-mcp-server-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad 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/channel/aidotengineer/explore/video/your-mcp-server-is-bad-and-you-should-feel-bad-jere-ebf14d956dec · 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.