I Built a Production MCP Server Kit — Here's What I Learned

Every MCP starter on GitHub is a hello-world. I needed production features. I spent the last few months building MCP servers for real projects — integrating with Cursor, Claude Desktop, VS Code — and every time I started from an open-source template, I'd spend days bolting on the same stuff: auth, rate limiting, deployment configs, actual useful tools. So I built the starter kit I wished existed. Here's what went into it and the decisions I made along the way. The Problem Nobody Talks About MCP (Model Context Protocol) is everywhere right now. Cursor uses it. Claude Desktop uses it. VS Code Copilot is adopting it. It's becoming the standard way AI agents talk to external tools. But go look at the starter templates on GitHub. They all look like this: server . tool ( " hello " , " Says hello " , {}, () => ({ content : [{ type : " text " , text : " Hello, world! " }], })); Cool. Now what? You need auth because you're exposing this over the network. You need rate limiting because AI client