MCP Tools Integration Hands-On

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows large language models (LLMs) to call external tools while answering user prompts. In practice, most people use chat-based tools like Claude or Copilot rather than interacting directly with model APIs, and these tools make it easy to configure MCP servers without writing code. That said, if you want to connect your own data sources or custom functions as MCP tools, or connect your code to MCP tools, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and do some hands-on work. ...

January 4, 2026 · 9 min · Michael OShea

AI Cloud Interactive Hype Cycle 2025

Based on Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Platform Services, 2025 ...

September 29, 2025 · 1 min · Michael OShea

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Best Practices

As we integrate services and data APIs into agentic AI solutions, interest is growing in how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can standardize the way tools expose their capabilities to agents. With that in mind, I’ve assembled—yes, with the help of AI—a survey of key topics and resources related to MCP. MCP is an open standard (launched by Anthropic in Nov 2024) for exposing data sources, tools, and “resources” to AI agents via a uniform interface. It is designed to replace the ad-hoc “one-off connector per tool/agent” pattern, simplifying how LLM-based agents integrate with live systems. [1] ...

September 29, 2025 · 8 min · Michael OShea

A2A Doesn't need AI Agents

Is this just distributed computing re-packaged for AI? What is A2A Without AI Agents? I got into a debate with Gemini recently about Agent-To-Agent protocol (A2A). I said I thought it was a retread of existing distributed computing technologies like Service Discovery, Mesh, CORBA, etc. Perhaps Gemini took it personally, as Google (Gemini’s Creator) had announced A2A in April, and Gemini got a little “gushy” on how it was “a revolutionary new idea.” Also, perhaps “debate” is too strong a word. And I might want to consider getting out more often. ...

September 28, 2025 · 2 min · Michael OShea

Building a Hybrid Summary Evaluation Framework

Combining deterministic NLP with LLM-as-Judge for robust evaluation Summary Evaluation Challenges Summary evaluation metrics sometimes fall short in capturing the qualities most relevant to assessing summary quality. Traditional machine learning for natural language processing (NLP) has covered a lot of ground in this area. Widely used measures such as ROUGE focus on surface-level token overlap and n-gram matches. While effective for evaluating lexical similarity, these approaches offer limited insight into aspects such as factual accuracy or semantic completeness [1]. ...

September 14, 2025 · 7 min · Michael OShea

LLMs At The Command Line - Part 1

If you are a command-line fan and want to experiment with large language models (LLM), you will love AiChat. There are many popular graphical front ends for working with LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude, but get ready for this little powerhouse for CLI lovers as it has many advanced and useful features. One such feature is an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box RAG feature (Retrieval Augmented Generation) useful for searching existing content. I’ve put together a small demo here that shows how easy it can be to use in a pinch. There are many use cases where such an approach is just the right size. ...

January 18, 2025 · 1 min · Michael OShea