Your MCP Server is Bad (and you should feel bad) | Jeremiah Lowin, AI Engineer Code Summit 2025

Jeremiah Lowin breaks down why most MCP servers miss the mark and what to do about it. As the creator of FastMCP, Jeremiah has seen every way people build MCP servers. Most of them aren't great. But here's the thing - it's not because people are bad at building. It's because we're designing for the wrong user. This talk is about agentic product design. Agents aren't humans. They're expensive at discovery, slow at iteration, and limited on context. So why are we building interfaces for them like they're just magical humans who can handle anything? Recorded at AI Engineer Code Summit 2025. Learn more about FastMCP: github.com/PrefectHQ/fastmcp Learn more about Prefect: prefect.io CONTENT: 00:00 Intro 00:01:17 Background: Prefect, Airflow, Marvin, FastMCP 00:01:39 FastMCP's growth 00:02:53 Why so many MCP servers aren't great 00:03:41 What is agentic product design? 00:04:26 "If a human can use an API, why can't AI?" - the wrong question 00:05:25 Humans don't use APIs, they use products 00:05:45 Three dimensions: discovery, iteration, context 00:06:03 Discovery: cheap for humans, expensive for agents 00:06:45 Iteration: fast for humans, slow for agents 00:07:05 Context: unlimited for humans, limited for agents 00:46:42 Q&A: Async tasks and backgrounding 00:48:00 Q&A: Elicitation and getting more input mid-execution 00:50:16 Q&A: MCP vs agent frameworks 00:52:22 Q&A: Code mode 00:53:41 Closing