Bending a Public MCP Server Without Breaking It
summary
Shows a concrete engineering path: starts with Playwright MCP server offering 21 generic tools that cause a vanilla run to fail, then iterates through five practical moves—curate tools, wrap and rewrite descriptions, add deterministic guardrails (path validation for screenshots), compose an evidence tool, and pull login out of agentic flow using JWTs. Demonstrates a spec‑reviewer built end‑to‑end, measures tool count drop and a failing→passing run, and shares code patterns and tradeoffs useful for immediate reuse.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 4:32Agentic tools challenges
- 8:08Vanilla tools baseline
- 14:26Optimizing third-party tools
- 15:50Curating tools context
- 18:22Tailored tool descriptions
- 22:55Guardrails for security
- 28:58Composing tools
- 32:57Tools as functions
- 36:52Demo and results
- 39:21Summary
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