I built an MCP server for my API directory. Here's why.

A few weeks ago I launched patchBay, an API directory with 3,100+ entries. Think ProgrammableWeb but not dead. The SEO play is obvious: good content, structured data, wait for Google to compound. But there's a second distribution channel that didn't exist two years ago: AI coding assistants. When a developer asks Claude Code or Cursor "what's the best geocoding API with a free tier," something has to answer that question. I wanted it to be patchBay. That's where MCP comes in. What MCP actually is MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the standard that lets AI assistants call external tools mid-conversation. When you ask Claude Code to help you pick a library and it goes off and checks something, that's MCP. It's how you wire your own data into the conversation context of tools like Claude, Cursor, and Cline. For patchBay, this meant: instead of waiting for a developer to Google "best free weather API" and maybe find my site, their AI assistant could query patchBay directly and return a real,