MCP Foundations

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the emerging standard for connecting models to tools, data, and prompts through a uniform interface, and it is one of the fastest-moving integration layers in the field. This track covers building MCP servers and clients from the primitives up — tools, resources, and prompts — across the available transports, plus the security model (what an MCP server is allowed to do, and how to scope it), debugging with the Inspector, and how MCP plugs into Claude Code. It is the difference between bolting a one-off tool onto a model and exposing a reusable, governed capability any client can consume.