Building and securing MCP servers with FastMCP

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most MCP tutorials stop at a server that adds two numbers over stdio, and that part isn’t where anyone gets stuck. The work is everything you hit once you put an MCP in front of real company data: who’s allowed to call what, how you authenticate them, what you log, and how you stop eighty tools overwhelming the model.

I’ve spent a big chunk of the last few months living in this, including a run of conversations with Australian businesses and a few US fintech companies trying to wire MCPs into real systems. The question that comes up every time is whether you can safely let a tool reach production data, and the fintechs especially won’t let you hand-wave that.

Skills or MCP servers: when you need a server

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep hearing that you don’t need MCP servers any more, just use skills. For a lot of jobs that’s right, and it’s usually the simpler answer. It stops being enough once more than one person shares the data behind it.

A skill is really just direction: the prompt, the glue code, the bit of knowledge the model should have and the steps it should follow. And it runs right there in the user’s own context with the user’s own credentials. That’s its strength for a single user: nothing to stand up, nothing to authenticate, it uses whatever access you already have. If the job is “teach the agent how to do this thing” or “wire these two commands together”, a skill is the whole answer and a server would be overhead.

Mcp on coles.codes

Building and securing MCP servers with FastMCP

Skills or MCP servers: when you need a server