I Built My First MCP Server in TypeScript in 4 Hours — Here's What Nobody Tells You

I'm a software engineer with 2 years of experience. I kept hearing about MCP (Model Context Protocol) and how it's the "future of AI integrations." So I spent my holiday weekend actually building one from scratch. Here's my honest experience — including the errors, the confusion, and the moment it finally clicked. What is MCP, actually? Everyone describes it as "a protocol that lets AI models use tools." That sounds fancy. Here's the simpler version: You build a wrapper around any API. Claude calls it using plain English. That's it. Your server has zero AI in it. Claude is the brain. Your server is just the hands. Once I understood that, everything made sense. What I built A weather MCP server in TypeScript that exposes 3 tools to Claude: get_current_weather — current conditions for any city get_forecast — 1 to 7 day forecast get_weather_by_coords — weather by latitude/longitude Uses the Open-Meteo API — completely free, no API key needed, works globally. GitHub: https://github.com/hem