Building Your First MCP Server in TypeScript: Connect AI Agents to Anything

Last week, Google shipped a Colab MCP Server . Anthropic's Claude can now talk to databases, APIs, and file systems through MCP. If you've been paying attention, you know MCP (Model Context Protocol) is eating the AI tooling world . But here's the thing — most tutorials show you "hello world" examples that are useless in production. Let's fix that. In this guide, we'll build a real MCP server that gives AI agents the ability to query databases, manage deployments, and monitor services. By the end, you'll understand the protocol deeply enough to connect AI to anything . What is MCP (and Why Should You Care)? MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how AI models interact with external tools and data. Think of it as USB for AI — a universal plug that lets any AI model connect to any tool. Before MCP, every AI integration was bespoke. Want Claude to read your database? Custom code. Want GPT to deploy your app? Different custom code. MCP says: "Here's a standard way to expose tools, and a