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Your MCP Server is Bad (and you should feel bad) - Jeremiah Lowin, Prefect

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AI Engineer· published 2026-01-12· 0:54:32· en-US· indexed 2026-08-10 19:54

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Scene timeline

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139 shot(s).

keyframes kept every frame deduplicated

What was stored

cues
672
whisperx 672
chunks
99
from 672 cues
keyframes
109
kept of 139 captured
frames with text
109
574 lines read
chapters
0
from the source metadata
keyframe bytes
19.3 MB
word timings on 672 cues

Provenance

Each pipeline stage, its state and the model that produced it
stage state model started took
fetch done — 2026-08-10 17:44 2m 13s
stt done — 2026-08-10 17:47 1m 00s
chunk done — 2026-08-10 17:48 0s
text_embed done — 2026-08-10 19:53 1s
keyframe done — 2026-08-10 17:48 1m 37s
ocr done — 2026-08-10 17:49 22s
frame_embed done — 2026-08-10 19:54 19s

Frames, and what the machine read

  • 0:08 #0 done10 line(s)

    shot 0·sharpness 1335.0

    1. ANTHROPIC0.98
    2. Cline0.99
    3. Google DeepMind0.97
    4. HumanLayer1.00
    5. arize1.00
    6. replit1.00
    7. Google DeepMind1.00
    8. Code Summit0.99
    9. CURSOR1.00
    10. GoogleDeepMind0.97

  • 0:14 #1 done2 line(s)

    shot 1·sharpness 686.0

    1. PRESENTING SPONSOR0.99
    2. Google DeepMind0.99

  • 0:17 #2 done2 line(s)

    shot 2·sharpness 499.0

    1. PLATINUMSPONSOR1.00
    2. ANTHROP\C1.00

  • 0:38 #3 done7 line(s)

    shot 3·sharpness 1723.7

    1. Your MCP Serveris Bad0.99
    2. (and you should feel bad)0.99
    3. Jeremiah Lowin1.00
    4. Al Engineer Code Summit0.99
    5. November 22, 20250.99
    6. PREFECT2024 Prefec Technolgies, Inc.0.73
    7. 2025-11-2213:13:501.00

  • 1:10 #4 skipped

    shot 4·duplicate of #3

  • 1:14 #5 skipped

    shot 5·duplicate of #3

  • 1:43 #6 done5 line(s)

    shot 6·sharpness 1768.5

    1. $whoami1.00
    2. ■Founder & CEO: Prefect Technologies0.98
    3. Responsible for: Prefect, Marvin, FastMCP1.00
    4. Status: Slightly overwhelmed1.00
    5. 2025-11-2213:14:540.97

  • 2:14 #7 skipped

    shot 7·duplicate of #6

  • 2:48 #8 done14 line(s)

    shot 8·sharpness 1766.4

    1. I've seen a lot of MCPs0.98
    2. Daily Download Quantity of fastmcp package - Overall1.00
    3. 30d 60d 90d 120d0.98
    4. all1.00
    5. 1,500,0001.00
    6. Dods0.61
    7. 1,000,0001.00
    8. With_Mirrors1.00
    9. Without_Mirrors1.00
    10. 500,0001.00
    11. 80.94
    12. Date1.00
    13. © Copyright 2024 Prefect Technologies, Inc.0.95
    14. 2025-11-2213:16:000.98

  • 2:57 #9 skipped

    shot 9·duplicate of #8

  • 3:52 #10 done4 line(s)

    shot 10·sharpness 775.1

    1. YOUR IDEAS ARE BAD,0.97
    2. AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD!1.00
    3. © Copyright 2024 Prefect Technologies, Inc.0.97
    4. 2025-11-2213:17:040.98

  • 4:14 #11 done4 line(s)

    shot 11·sharpness 1538.1

    1. Objective:1.00
    2. Build intuition for agentic1.00
    3. product design1.00
    4. 2025-11-2213:17:260.98

  • 4:36 #12 skipped

    shot 12·duplicate of #11

  • 5:25 #13 done3 line(s)

    shot 13·sharpness 1168.8

    1. "If a human can use an API,0.98
    2. why can't an Al?"0.98
    3. 2025-11-2213:18:360.98

  • 5:46 #14 done3 line(s)

    shot 14·sharpness 1371.6

    1. Humans don't use APls.0.98
    2. Humans use products.0.98
    3. 2025-11-2213:18:570.98

  • 6:16 #15 done7 line(s)

    shot 15·sharpness 1193.0

    1. Human1.00
    2. Developers1.00
    3. Al Agents0.99
    4. Discovery1.00
    5. Iteration1.00
    6. Context1.00
    7. 2025-11-2213:19:280.99

  • 6:27 #16 skipped

    shot 16·duplicate of #15

  • 6:50 #17 skipped

    shot 17·duplicate of #15

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    shot 20·duplicate of #15

  • 8:47 #21 done6 line(s)

    shot 21·sharpness 1908.4

    1. Agents can find a0.99
    2. needle in a haystack.1.00
    3. But only by examining1.00
    4. every piece of hay.1.00
    5. Technologies, Inc.0.96
    6. 2025-11-2213:21:591.00

  • 9:13 #22 done6 line(s)

    shot 22·sharpness 2335.2

    1. Product intuition:0.99
    2. How to curate the smallest1.00
    3. effective surface area for0.97
    4. autonomous users?1.00
    5. 2025-11-2213:22:241.00
    6. Technologies, Inc0.99

  • 9:33 #23 skipped

    shot 23·duplicate of #22

Transcript

672 cues· 10,345 words· 53,579 chars

  1. 0:20 I really do appreciate that you're all here.
  2. 0:22 I'm going to try and make this as painless as possible.
  3. 0:24 We're not going to do an interactive part.
  4. 0:27 We're going to talk through stuff.
  5. 0:28 I'm happy to go off script.
  6. 0:29 I'm happy to take questions if there's stuff we want to explore at any moment in this.
  7. 0:34 My goal is I'd like to share with you a lot of things that I've learned.
  8. 0:38 I'm going to try and make them as actionable as possible, so there is real stuff to do here, more than we might in a more high-level talk.
  9. 0:47 But let's be very honest.
  10. 0:48 It is late.
  11. 0:49 It is a lot.
  12. 0:50 It is long.
  13. 0:51 Let's talk about MCP.
  14. 0:53 I'm hoping that folks here are interested in MCP, and that's why you came to this talk.
  15. 0:56 If you're here to learn about MCP, this might be a little bit of a different bent.
  16. 1:00 Just show of hands.
  17. 1:03 Heard of MCP?
  18. 1:05 Used MCP?
  19. 1:07 Written in MCP server?
  20. 1:10 OK.
  21. 1:11 Anyone feel uncomfortable with MCP, which is 100% fine.
  22. 1:14 We can tailor.
  23. 1:16 Okay, then I would say, let's just go, let's dive in.
  24. 1:21 This is who I am.
  25. 1:22 I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Prefect Technologies.
  26. 1:24 For the last seven or eight years, we've been building data automation software and orchestration software.
  27. 1:30 Before that, I was a member of the Apache Airflow PMC.
  28. 1:34 I originally started Prefect to graduate the same orchestration ideas into data science.
  29. 1:38 Today, we operate the full stack.
  30. 1:40 And then a few years ago, I developed an agent framework called
  31. 1:45 Marvin, which I would not describe as wildly popular, but it was my leg into the world of AI, at least from a developer experience standpoint, and learned a lot from that.
  32. 1:53 And then more recently, I introduced a software called Fast MCP, which is wildly, wildly popular, maybe even too popular.
  33. 2:00 And
  34. 2:02 hence my status today.
  35. 2:04 I'm a little overwhelmed.
  36. 2:06 I find myself back in an open source maintenance seat, which I haven't been in a few years, which has been a hell of a lot of fun.
  37. 2:12 But the most important thing is that FastMCP has given me a very specific vantage point that is really the basis for this talk today.
  38. 2:19 This is our downloads.
  39. 2:20 I've never seen anything like this.
  40. 2:21 I've never worked on a project like this.
  41. 2:22 It was downloaded a million and a half times yesterday.
  42. 2:26 There's a lot of MCP servers out there and FastMCP is just, it's become the defacto standard way to build MCP servers.
  43. 2:35 I introduced it almost exactly a year ago, as many of you are probably aware, MCP itself was introduced almost exactly a year ago.
  44. 2:40 And a few days later, I introduced the first version of FastMCP.
  45. 2:43 David at Anthropic called me up, said, I think this is great.
  46. 2:46 I think this is how people should build servers.
  47. 2:48 We put a version of it into the official SDK, which was amazing.
  48. 2:52 And then as MCP has gone,
  49. 2:55 crazy in the last year we found it actually to be constructive to position fast mcp uh as i'm maintaining it as the high level interface to the mcp ecosystem while the sdk sdk focuses on the low level primitives and actually we're going to remove the fast mcp vocabulary from the low level sdk um in a couple of months it's become a
  50. 3:16 little bit of it's too confusing that there are these two things called fast mcp so fast mcp will be a high level interface to the world and um as a result we see a lot of um not great mcp servers i

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