920: How to Build MCP Servers

Wes and Scott talk about how developers can expose powerful tools to AI using the Model Context Protocol. They discuss tool calling, remote MCP specs, authentication, and real-world use cases that make AI more capable through smarter integrations. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:36 What is MCP? 07:23 MCP tools 11:33 MCP resources 13:43 Saving reusable prompts 16:18 Creating and validating MCP tools 18:31 Brought to you by Sentry.io 18:31 Tool calling vs MCP servers 21:28 Remote vs local MCP servers mcp-remote 26:24 Useful MCP servers mcp-server-cloudflare use-mcp awesome-mcp-servers 32:48 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Mario Kart World Wes: anyloop Kid’s Watch Shameless Plugs Syntax YouTube Channel Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  Welcome to Syntax Today, we have an episode on building MCP servers. We talked about MCP, I don't know, maybe a couple of months ago. And so much has changed since that episode that I thought we need to do a brand new episode on explaining what it is, explaining all the updates to it and kind of diving into all of the different pieces and tools and helpful things around it. MCP is the Model Context Protocol. It's for exposing tools to AI. We'll talk a little bit more about that, but it's going to be a great episode. You're certainly not going to want to miss this one. What's up, Scott?

• 0:35Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, hey, man. I'm sick. All this stuff. There's been somebody jackhammering, I'm going to say this, somebody's jackhammering a patio for like two straight days now. And this is finally the first little window where there's been some silence. I mean, they were jackhammering at like 6:00 PM. We were going to eat outside and it was still going on. I don't understand how you could spend that much time jackhammering a patio.

• 1:04Wes Bos?

  That's unreasonable time to jackhammer. Yeah.

• 1:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you can't do that. You can't, when people are trying to eat dinner and you're jackhammering. So, yeah, not a fan of that. And, uh, yeah, so my, besides that, I've just been like banging my head against some code stuff and I'm sure the jackhammering has not been like helping my brain function today. So that's where I'm at. Yeah, one of those days, right?

• 1:26Wes Bos?

  Well, I'm going to fill you with MCP nuggets and I feel like you'll be, you'll be back to your bright self by the end of this.

• 1:34Scott Tolinski?

  Love that, yes.

• 1:36Wes Bos?

  So, all right, let's get in on into it. So MCP, it's a standard for being able to surface tools to AI. So whether you are using like an IDE editor like VS Code or Cursor, or whether you're using a chat application like Claude Desktop, or whether you are building your own thing with AI libraries, like the OpenAI TypeScript library, all of those things have the ability to surface additional

• 2:10Wes Bos?

  Tools to it via something called MCP. And I'll give you an example of of where I ran into it recently. I built my second MCP server a couple of days ago. So I'm feeling feeling fresh on that. And I use a lot of the new features that have come out since we did the first episode on it. So the application that I was building was sort of like this little scratch pad that will will do calculations for you. So I find myself often doing things like just like writing notes in a text editor and then having to do quick little math, you know? Like, uh, this thing costs a hundred dollars and then you add on tax and shipping. And then I'll divide it by there's two of them, you divide by two.

• 2:55Wes Bos?

  Or, all right, we have to record six episodes and that's this many hours. On average, they're between this and this. And I find myself just having to like copy paste that into a calculator or something like that. And I'm like, I want like a natural language UI for doing currency conversion and addition and whatnot. So there's a couple of apps out there that do it, but none of them have are using AI. And I thought AI is so good at natural language processing. So I built it up and it worked really well, except there were two problems. First of all, AI sucks at math. It was just imagining. Yeah. Totals up like some of them were correct.

• 3:38Wes Bos?

  And then some of them were just like, no, that's, that's not right. That's, that's not right at all. Or I would do things like T-shirt vendor one has a $50 setup. And then at 100 T-shirts, it would cost $7 per T-shirt. And at 500 T-shirts, it would cost 555. And then vendor number two, I would go ahead and give all the stats. Which one is the better deal? And it would go ahead and do all the math for me, find the averages. And then it would tell me at 100 and 500 T-shirts, which was the better vendor? And it sounds like a math problem from like a textbook. But it was just imagining the actual answers, you know? And I was like, this is kind of frustrating.

• 4:18Wes Bos?

  So what you have to do in these situations where AI doesn't necessarily excel at doing these things is you have to give it tools, right? And one thing that AI sucks at is math. So I implemented something called tool calling, which is not MCP. I'll talk about the differences later on in the show. And basically, you give it access to a tool that can do math. So I exposed it. It's called MathJS library. And then what it does is anytime it needs to do math, it simply just returns the function call that needs to be run. It runs that function, then it passes it back to the AI with the actual answer.

• 4:58Wes Bos?

  So we're actually like evaluating the math, not with AI, but with a computer. So that worked really well. And then the next step I needed was like, I needed like currency conversion, you know? But I needed like real up-to-date rates. And the AI doesn't necessarily know what the currency rates are. So what I did is I created a MCP server that will expose several tools for getting rates, for converting currency, for getting historical rates. So when the AI realizes it needs to fetch a rate or do some conversions, it can simply

• 5:40Wes Bos?

  use the tools that I have supplied to it via MCP. So here I have this little MCP jam, which is a, yeah, cool, yes, answer or question there, student Scott.

• 5:50Scott Tolinski?

  What I don't want to do, I don't want to interrupt you. How does the AI know when to use one of these specific tools?

• 5:57Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 5:58Scott Tolinski?

  Are you having to pass specific keywords or is context enough?

• 6:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah, so when you're loading a tool, when you're defining a tool, you you give it a description. Actually, hilariously enough, I was just, you just asked me that question and I went to show you my description. I don't even have descriptions for the four tools. But if you go into like the Sentry MCP and load all of their tools, you can see here that there's like a find teams tool here. And it says finds teams in organizations Sentry. Use this tool when you need to view all teams in a Sentry organization. Find the teams slug to aid in other tool requests. So that, both the name of it, obviously was enough for me, as well as the description will be made available to the AI.

• 6:45Wes Bos?

  And then the AI will be able to decide when it wants to use a specific tool and wants to run it.

• 6:53Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, I've always found that it will be a little bit interesting with MCP. Maybe it's gotten easier to always get the the right call. I know this is calling tools.

• 7:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah, because you, I think what what can happen is if when you have too many tools, you just like load it up and give it a bazillion. It won't necessarily know which one to run.

• 7:15Scott Tolinski?

  Too many tools.

• 7:16Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 7:17Scott Tolinski?

  Syntax, the syntax dot FM team.

• 7:21Wes Bos?

  Too many tools, yes. So that was the MCP server that I made. And I obviously have a couple other MCP servers here. We got the CloudFlare Worker MCP server. What this will do is that you authenticate, which is a new part of the MCP spec that we did not cover last time. So the ability to use OAuth flows inside of MCP server is now possible, meaning that you can hook it up to your CloudFlare or your Sentry or whatever. And then when you try to use that tool, you have to first do that whole, do you want to allow this application? And you click yes, and then it it will then connect it to the thing that you have. So authentication is something that is relatively new,

• 8:04Wes Bos?

  as well as the transport protocols. So there's two ways that MCP currently works. The first one is Via standard I O, meaning that the M C P server is going to be running locally on your machine or on the same machine that the A I process is running. So if you have like a node script or something that's that's handling incoming requests, you might also have a M C P server running that will be able to input and output data. So that's that's standard I O. And then the other way that M C P works is via A C D P and server sent events,

• 8:45Wes Bos?

  which is more probably what people listening to this podcast are going to want to use because we're we're web developers, right? You want to be able to fire up a server. You want to have U R L endpoints and then people can connect to it. So that's generally how I'm connecting to all of these. You'll see I have this one currency dash M C P dot west boss dot com. When it connects to that, you can list all of the different tools that are available as well as now there we go, they're they're listed. As well as some of the other things like resources and prompts. I'll talk about in just just a second. So H D P M C P servers will either return one of two things. First of all, you you send a post request to it.

• 9:31Wes Bos?

  And then what is returned is either going to be just a J S O N payload. Like, give me a list of all of your tools or let me go ahead and use one of these tools. So for example, get latest rates, go ahead and run that tool. It's going to give me a list of all the the rates, but you can also change like the base currency. Go ahead and rerun that and it will give me the Canadian rates. So that will either return just J S O N back or it will give you a stream which uses server sent events. So it will either return immediately or a stream that that then can send data as it's made available over server sent events.

• 10:16Wes Bos?

  Server sent events are kind of a interesting one because it requires your server to be long running.

• 10:24Wes Bos?

  You know what's not very good at being long-running computers? Serverless.

• 10:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, correct.

• 10:31Wes Bos?

  We kind of need servers, yeah. So the solution to that is Cloudflare uses durable objects. Versal uses Fluid Compute. Basically, anyone who is offering hosting of MCP servers will either be running it on like a long-term storage or they'll have some sort of other way to get around that via durable objects or Fluid Compute. This tool that I'm using, or if you want to be able to explore an MCP, you can use what's called the MCP Inspector. And that will allow you to connect to an MCP server

• 11:13Wes Bos?

  and you can view all of the things that it has available to you. So Tools is probably the most popular one, right? Like, here's an example MCP server that will surface a whole bunch of different tools. You know, add print environmental variables, annotate message. But there is also things like resources, which are allowing you to supply files to an AI, which is really cool. So last time we talked about MCP, I said the server that I built was something that would go off and download an SVG icon and then bring it back to the AI. Because that's something the AI sucks at. It sucks at getting icons, you know?

• 11:58Wes Bos?

  Like, put a Chrome icon here. So I hooked it up to an API that went ahead and downloaded the SVG icon and brought it back. But at the time, not many of these apps supported resources. So there was actually no way to give the AI the actual SVG icon. So what I did is I told it just to like, run a cat command and pipe it into SVG. Now, you can properly give it a file or an image or any other type of resource that you would be expecting. So if you say like, "Go off and download six sound effects of cats meowing", you could write an MCP server that could do that.

• 12:41Scott Tolinski?

  That is something I would like to do. I think if I'm reaching for AI, that's the type of thing typically.

• 12:49Scott Tolinski?

  That I might want to do. I want to have some cats meowing. One time, I used to work at a record label, Ghostly International, for people who might have heard of it. We each used to get, like, there would be a rotation of who got to pick the album that we'd be listening to. And there's like six people in the office, and these, mind you, are very into music people. I'm very into music person myself, but these guys were very serious. And it was often like, I'm gonna put on this album that is like touching my soul right now. And one time I put on The Beetle Barkers, which was just dogs barking the beetles. And I think they all wanted to fire me, because we listened to the whole thing, and they were so... They were so mad about it by the end of the...

• 13:35Scott Tolinski?

  Because they're like, they were gonna throw me out the window, I swear, but I really liked it.

• 13:39Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's hilarious.

• 13:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Wes Bos?

  Another part of the MCP spec is the ability to save reusable prompts. And this is really cool, because, like, you know how we have like cursor rules? You know, like, kind of things that you want to tell the AI over and over again?

• 13:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Wes Bos?

  It's not the exact same thing, but the idea of a server being able to ship prompts along with other tools is really neat and really useful. So, for example, on Cloudflare Workers, if you load their prompts, you see they have "Workers Prompt Full", and you can go ahead and load that sucker. Basically, what they're going to return is, this is a massive prompt for working with Cloudflare Workers, right? It just says, like, "Use TypeScript unless explicitly told to use JavaScript. Always add appropriate types and interfaces, use ES modules." So like, that's kind of like cursor code guidelines.

• 14:41Wes Bos?

  But then they also have output formats, a bunch of integrations, and then all kinds of different code examples that you could possibly have, right? That's a massive prompt that's gonna help your AI agent that's generating code to generate code that is much more... More in line with it. So they provide those prompts because if you were to tell the AI agent, "Hey, create a CloudFlare worker that does X, Y, and Z." Chances are it's going to go ahead and grab the prompt for that CloudFlare worker because it now knows I'm building that, download it, and then put that as part of the prompt before it goes off. So this like MCP Jam, MCP Inspector,

• 15:26Wes Bos?

  these are tools that are just for exploring it. This is not actually something that you would be using it directly. Like I said earlier, the way that it generally would work is you would add these MCPs to your chat application. You would add it to your cursor, your VS Code IDE, anything that interacts with ID. In my case, I was using the OpenAI TypeScript SDK. And in order to surface this currency conversion, you simply just add it as an MCP. And then when the AI goes off and runs it, it says, "Oh, that's neat. I have access to these tools." Right? And if you're using ChatGPT, you can tell that it like sometimes it just searches the web. Yeah.

• 16:11Wes Bos?

  That's a tool that they have integrated into it. So it knows it can go ahead and do these things. Actually coding these tools, let's talk about that now. Why that, what that actually looks like. The way that it works is you can fire up a MCP server. This one in my case is using the MCP server from Anthropic. They're the makers of the spec. And then in order to actually make it hostable and long running, I'm using the CloudFlare Agents MCP that just extends that. But most of this code is going to be standard MCP spec.

• 16:54Wes Bos?

  And then you simply just, when it fires up, you can add resources or prompts. In my case, I'm just adding tools. So convert currency or get latest rates and then.

• 17:07Wes Bos?

  You give it a schema. Now, the schema is really important because it's schema. It does several things, right? It it tells the AI how to give it the information, right? Because the AI has to know how to structure the input. It does the validation of the data coming in. So in my case, I am using ZOD. So generate latest race schema. Right? You you can take the base, which is a currency code. You can go ahead to describe it. And then you can give it different symbols. Maybe if we take a look at

• 17:47Wes Bos?

  the convert currency, there is a from Canadian to USD and amount. And in order to specify that schema, I've done it all out in ZOD. You can use any, any one that you want, but you must validate that the data coming in from the AI is of the format that you expect it before you go ahead and and pass it through. And then you can also specify the output types. This is something that I have created, but I'm not using it yet because I have not yet found anything that can use these things. So the output schema is just a new part of the spec, which I have not found to be implemented anywhere yet.

• 18:31Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right.

• 18:56Scott Tolinski?

  So your calling tools, which we said at one point is an MCP, are is is tool calling an MCP? Related, similar, the same. What's the lingo there?

• 19:09Wes Bos?

  It's kind of a confusing thing. So before we had MCP, we had this idea that like the OpenAI docs, you can give it, you can have function calling is what they called it. And then we have MCP, which kind of seems like the same thing, but also isn't. So the difference between the two, as far as I understand it, there's a lot of overlap between them. The tool calling is something that's going to happen on the same server that your AI code is running. So for a very simple example, is I was, I gave it a math tool calling. So it's able to do things like add and subtract and average and max the different numbers.

• 19:54Wes Bos?

  And it will be able to run those. Whereas the MCP server can live somewhere else. The MCP server can live on the same machine as well, but it also, it can live absolutely somewhere else. And also it seems to be a little bit more, more stateful, you know? There's authentication, there is long-lived sessions that are streaming data back and forth. There is lots of back and forth with the, the actual server. So once you're logged in, then you can say, what are my things? So I, I feel like the tool calling is for very simple functions that need to get run.

• 20:38Wes Bos?

  Whereas the MCP server is going to be for, in my example, I'm connecting to the Cloudflare workers ones to get docs and be able to create databases. I'm connecting to my Sentry MCP to be able to get a list of my issues or to, to kick off their AI agent to actually fix the things for you. I've got my currency one, which is going off and fetching the currency rates and able to calculate them for me. So I feel like they have quite a bit of overlap, but the MCP.

• 21:11Wes Bos?

  Can be remote and the MCP is a standard specification. So I would, unless it's just a very simple function that I'm running, I would probably throw that off to a separate MCP server. One more thing, I've been talking about remote MCP servers and that's a relatively new thing to the spec, meaning that previously your MCP server had to be running locally on the same machine that your, your actual AI code is running. And, and that's really helpful for something like Puppeteer, right? There's a Puppeteer MCP server that can, has the ability to fire up a browser, navigate

• 21:55Wes Bos?

  through the page, take screenshots, count, see if something's on the page. You know, like anything that you could normally do, you can sort of robot via an MCP server where you're basically, when you fire it up, you're saying, hey, here is, and I think the, the Puppeteer MCP server has about 40 or 45 tools. And you say, these are 45 things you can do in a browser. Go nuts. You can, you can do any of them. You can control the entire browser, right? Like that makes a lot of sense. You run that in a Docker container and it runs on the same machine that you have. But then other, other things like the Sentry one, the Cloudflare Workers one, that makes more sense to log in and be able to communicate back and forth because

• 22:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:39Wes Bos?

  They have all the information, right?

• 22:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. In fact, that's primarily how I've often used them. Now I have used like the Sentry one, but you know, the, the MCP server I've been using the most lately is the Godot one. And there's like, I will tell you folks, if you're out there looking for good MCP servers, it's, it's really the wild, wild west with a lot of them right now. There's like six or seven different Godot MCP servers and I would say, uh, one or two good ones. And even though two good, one or two good ones vary pretty widely in terms of what they're able to do. So.

• 23:11Wes Bos?

  And how are you interfacing with that? That server?

• 23:15Scott Tolinski?

  Via cursor currently.

• 23:17Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 23:18Scott Tolinski?

  Because I, what I'm doing is I'm working on a game and Godot has its own interface that also has an API and the Godot MCP server allows it so that I don't have to work inside of Godot, but I can control the Godot interface via cursor if I want to automate certain things, create resources, update things through the UI, those types of things.

• 23:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's, that's great. I even think about like OBS, which we use quite a bit. OBS has a WebSocket API to do literally anything. And I built an app that allows us to start and, and turn off recordings and record screens and do a whole bunch of like neat stuff. But I often think like, hmm, wouldn't that be nice if it was just a MCP server? Because then you can just, you could just type to what you want. Or like, like a lot of times I look at, at something like, like the Cloudflare Workers one where, let's take a look at the tools here.

• 24:23Scott Tolinski?

  OBS, I would like you to have these settings, the settings that are the best from YouTube. Give me the YouTube settings.

• 24:31Wes Bos?

  There we go. Find issues in the Syntax FM org on, on the Sentry MCP and then it, it just fires them all out. But like, I often think, like, it could probably do like generative UI. Like, if you just give it a list of all the possible things that you can do, it could probably do a pretty good job at just building out a UI for you. And I built a whole UI for the, the OBS one. And I, like, don't you think it could do a, if you were to have an MCP server of, these are all the possible things you can do?

• 25:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Wes Bos?

  It could probably generate a pretty neat. On-demand UI.

• 25:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, especially because OBS is one of those things that sucks to work in.

• 25:13Wes Bos?

  I don't know if it would make a better UI than than what it is. I don't think the AI will know better.

• 25:18Scott Tolinski?

  No, I'm just saying like you would have to interface with it less.

• 25:23Wes Bos?

  Anyways, what I was saying about the remote MCP servers is that not all clients support them just yet because it is a relatively new. This whole MCP thing is moving at like a breakneck speed right now. And I imagine that this episode in in three months will be relatively out of date and we'll have to have to do another one. But if you are using a client that doesn't support remote MCP servers yet, which is most of them, then what you'll have to do is you'll have to use this little NPX MCP remote. And what that does is it just fires up a little proxy server on your machine

• 26:04Wes Bos?

  and it will sort of translate them from one to another. It's it's a pretty common thing. Anytime like you see any documentation for for integrating them, you'll you'll have to be using this MCP remote.

• 26:17Scott Tolinski?

  I was gonna say, most of the documentation for remote ones is going to include that anyways for common providers.

• 26:24Wes Bos?

  Let's just rattle through a couple really handy ones as well. Obviously, I've been talking about the Cloudflare ones. Look at how many they have, though.

• 26:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Wes Bos?

  They have one for their docs, one for workers, one for worker builds. That's kind of worker builds would be kind of cool because you could just chat, hey, why did my build fail?

• 26:43Scott Tolinski?

  Can you explain to me why you would need one for the docs?

• 26:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah, documentation is so key because

• 26:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, but like why need it? Why would you need an MCP server for the docs themselves?

• 26:55Wes Bos?

  Basically, you're working on

• 26:59Wes Bos?

  Something, right? You're working on CloudFlare workers, you're working on Svelte, you're working on whatever, and you need to be able to give the AI the specific docs. If the AI knows, oh, I'm going to go grab the documentation for this specific library, it can go ahead, it'll just simply fetch it, and then it can go through it and pull the parts out that it needs and understand how it works. And that's, that's huge. So you basically just have to throw an MCP server for the docs of what you're working on. And then, like, the CloudFlare and Vercel both do an awesome job where they have all of

• 27:41Wes Bos?

  their documentation as Markdown. And that's a great thing, just to feed directly into an AI. But it's one step further where you don't even have to go copy paste it. You can simply just give it the tools like, hey, check the docs for X, Y, and Z, or if it doesn't understand how something works. Because so many of these things that are not, like, it's, AI is really good at writing NextJS and Tailwind, but there's a lot of other stuff that doesn't have a lot of examples out there that it's not very good at writing. And it's, it's hard when things change, like Svelte 5. It doesn't know about Svelte 5 just yet, right? Because the models haven't been trained on it. But if you can prompt

• 28:25Wes Bos?

  it with a whole bunch of examples and, and TypeScript types and how these things work, then it's going to do a much better job at how that works. There's this use MCP, which is a React hook, which is wild to me, because you basically just take any MCP server, feed it into this React hook, and it will give you all of the methods and state for using it inside of our React application, which is, is really cool. Which, a lot of this... Feels like we're just recreating REST APIs.

• 29:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, of course. Yeah, that is the weird thing.

• 29:06Wes Bos?

  With the currency one, I felt like I was just hot potatoing a lot of the requests from one to another. David Kramer had a really good tweet thread on it. Kenzie Dawes also replied. He had a blog post on it. He says like, "The MCP is not really your API. The MCP is more of a UI," which I thought was kind of an interesting way.

• 29:27Scott Tolinski?

  It's a connecting thread.

• 29:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. Instead of interfacing with your service or your API via buttons, you're interfacing the service via MCP, right? Or it's generally going to be something like chat. The AI is going to be doing that. So in some cases, those will be the same thing. You want your entire API to be available to the AI. But in other cases, like if you think about your UI, sometimes your UI will have two or three different API requests or REST requests. And then you'll need to do things in a specific order. And surfacing it via MCP request is more the move there.

• 30:12Wes Bos?

  So that's all we got on the MCP right now. There's this really great GitHub here called Awesome MCP Servers. You can kind of rip through it. It seems, it really feels like the early days of APIs. In the early days, everybody had an API and everybody was building stuff and remixing and connecting things together. And it was really good. And over time, a lot of those APIs disappeared, partially because people don't want you building your own version of Twitter or whatever social network they want you, or Reddit or whatever. And partially because like people use them to spam

• 30:56Wes Bos?

  and you can't give people programmatic tools for pushing things. However, it does feel...

• 31:03Wes Bos?

  Like, everybody's coming out swinging with their own MCP server right now. Um, and it's kind of an exciting time to, to see everybody, like, there's a Telegram one, and a welcome bot. Like, do we need a syntax MCP server? What would that do?

• 31:21Scott Tolinski?

  What would that do? What would that do?

• 31:24Wes Bos?

  You could get the latest show, uh, you could search for a specific, like, again, we're just describing.

• 31:30Scott Tolinski?

  Just an API. You're just giving it a different means of interfacing with it.

• 31:35Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think the, the real power of a lot of these APIs is, is both when you can pull content, but also when you can, can do things, right? Like, when you can start stuff, or save things, or modify.

• 31:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, especially things that have like a UI, because it gets you out of doing click ops for things.

• 31:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Scott Tolinski?

  But also, I mean, you're getting into AI ops, but like, yeah, if, if you're clicking around a UI to trigger things, and now you have a tool to interact with that via natural language, that seems interesting to me, or you're able to connect several tools together, you know, to work with each other. Yeah. Those seem like the biggest, uh, bonuses for me.

• 32:17Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and I, and probably the, the one other one I'd add to that is, is being able to get better results out of your, out of your AI application. Because at the end of the day, the whole reason I stumbled into all of this is because I simply just needed better math and better currency conversion in the app that I was building. And the, so this was not like a chat app that I was using directly. It's just, I just, the app that I was building was not very good. And in order to make it better, you have to give the AI more tools.

• 32:48Scott Tolinski?

  Well, that's great. Uh, you know, maybe we could have a MCP server for some sick picks, where it could just send you right to wherever we, we bought these things from. Sick picks are the things that we are enjoying, could be anything, a podcast, uh, could be just, just about any product type of thing, or, or whatever. Yeah, sick picks. You know what? I will sick pick. This is like, not really a unique sick pick in any regard.

• 33:18Scott Tolinski?

  But man, the new Mario Kart on Nintendo Switch 2 is just a lot of fun. I've only been playing with the kids and we'll find some time to rip around that thing. And when they announced like giving like modes where it was like give like steering assistance and stuff like that. I didn't really understand it, but like now that I'm playing with a six-year-old, man, the steering assistance stuff really helps them have a good time. Because even in the beginner settings, like, yeah, they're learning how to play the game and they're doing pretty decent. But they're finishing in the bottom half of the standings every time and they have a lot less fun doing that. And then when you turn on the steering assist, they're finishing in second place and fourth place.

• 34:03Scott Tolinski?

  And that just makes them like want to get better at the game and not get discouraged. So I've been really enjoying the game. I'm historically someone that plays Mario Kart games by picking the most obnoxious characters. Like who are the biggest, most annoying characters in the game? And let me tell you, this game has got some obnoxious characters. So I'll be the cow, I'll be charging Chuck, I'll be just like the goofiest characters. Cause that's, that's how I like to play. So yeah, the new Mario Kart is just lovely as you'd expect it to be.

• 34:36Wes Bos?

  That's good. I downloaded or purchased Mario Kart for the Wii. And I didn't realize that there's like a, there's like a hacked version of Mario Kart called Mario Kart Black. And like, like literally somebody like went and replaced all the music, all of the like infographics, even like the loading screen.

• 34:59Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, creepypasta. Yeah, wow.

• 35:01Wes Bos?

  And I just like, was like, hey kids, let's play Mario Kart. And I was like, this is dark.

• 35:07Scott Tolinski?

  This is what you downloaded? Oh, man. That's so funny.

• 35:12Wes Bos?

  But apparently somebody just like, like, like literally modded the entire image for Mario Kart.

• 35:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'm looking at it right now.

• 35:22Wes Bos?

  Mario Kart Black. Yeah, it's.

• 35:25Scott Tolinski?

  This is like scandalous, pixelated Princess Peach on the back cover of this thing. This is what you, this is what you loaded up. My gosh.

• 35:35Wes Bos?

  But that just goes to show how like not dial they am on video games. I was like Mario Kart Black? That sounds like the best one.

• 35:41Scott Tolinski?

  That sounds like the best one for sure.

• 35:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Scott Tolinski?

  Wow.

• 35:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah, man. Modding a Wii is the move if you don't have a Nintendo Switch. Cause we got a lot of games.

• 35:56Scott Tolinski?

  I modded my Nintendo Wii when I was in college, maybe.

• 36:02Wes Bos?

  It's still, it's still a good thing to do. It's great. Our kids love it. They don't know any better. That's the most hilarious thing. They don't realize that it can get any better.

• 36:11Scott Tolinski?

  Probably for the best.

• 36:14Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna sick pick a kid's smartwatch. So my daughter, I don't know, probably about six months ago, and my son just got one for his birthday. They got the AnyLoop Kids Smartwatch.

• 36:27Scott Tolinski?

  Cool.

• 36:27Wes Bos?

  And it's like the right amount of smartwatch. It's, the battery lasts like five or six days, which is awesome. Like it lasts, like it's not every day they're charging it. It does like step counting, which they love every day. How many steps you got? You know, they're trying to compete with us. And it's also interesting as a parent to see how many steps they have. It does heart rate. It does the weather if they're close enough to their iPad. It's just Bluetooth. There's no data on it or anything like that, no wifi. But it's, it's really cool. And they just, I just loved having a watch as a kid. And now they have a watch, which has a couple of neat features. They're setting timers on it and everything. And it's like something like 30, 35 bucks.

• 37:12Wes Bos?

  When we first got it, I was like, this thing's probably gonna suck, you know, like how good can a $35 smartwatch be? But it like, it's awesome. I'm, I'm very impressed at how good it is for, for a kid's watch. It's waterproof. It works great. So it's, it's from AnyLoop.

• 37:29Scott Tolinski?

  Hmm. Cool. Sick. Love that.

• 37:32Wes Bos?

  All right. That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. We will catch you later. Peace.