Field notes
Field notes
Working notes from building and maintaining MCP servers, published since August 2026. This is not a content-marketing feed; it is where the migration work, the security findings and the cost arithmetic get written down. If a post has nothing first-hand in it, it does not go up.
"MCP is dead" is right about your terminal and wrong about your product
The context-bloat criticism is real for solo developers and wrong for product integrations. Here is exactly where the line falls, with both sides cited.
Should you build your MCP server in-house? An honest decision framework
For roughly half of readers the answer is build it yourself. This is the framework, with the conditions spelled out and the cases where we lose.
How much does a custom MCP server cost in 2026?
Nobody in this category publishes prices. Here are ours, the formula behind them, and what the alternatives cost over 24 months.
Deprecated in MCP: Roots, Sampling, Logging and the HTTP+SSE transport
Deprecated is not removed. The 2026-07-28 policy guarantees a twelve-month window. What that means for planning, and why "it still works" misleads.
Is your MCP server still on an old spec revision? How to check in 60 seconds
Most teams do not know which revision their MCP server negotiates. Three ways to find out: curl, the Inspector, and the scanner.
What the 2026-07-28 MCP release broke, and how to migrate
The 2026-07-28 revision removed sessions and the handshake and deprecated three primitives. The migration checklist, in the order the work happens.