Letting coding agents search the web for documentation wastes tokens, increases latency, and risks importing outdated or incorrect API patterns. To resolve this, this article presents `agent-docs`, a system of local references stored directly within the repository. By instructing agents to search local Markdown documentation maps before attempting web queries, developers can ensure that agents always build on correct, version-aligned instructions.

Jeremiah Lowin — founder and CEO of Prefect and creator of FastMCP — traces how a two-hour struggle to build a basic MCP server turned into FastMCP, a side project that Anthropic folded into the official SDK and that now underpins roughly 70% of all MCP servers. He argues the biggest real-world use of MCP isn't reaching external customers but serving data and business logic to teams inside a company (especially data, platform, and ML teams building self-serve data platforms), where the client is known and trusted. He pushes back on the "MCP is dead / it should just be a CLI" narrative, blaming bad clients that dump every tool into an LLM's context rather than the protocol itself. The centerpiece is Prefab, a newly launched Python DSL of 100+ prefabricated, fully interactive React components (ShadCN-based) that let you return a chart, table, or form straight from a tool as an MCP App — token-efficient, streamable, and routed to the user's UI without polluting the LLM's context window. He closes with candid stories about his OpenClaw agent deleting his conference slides (forcing him to rebuild with Claude Code), how he uses a memory-driven home agent for family logistics, and the intimate, builders-only PyAI conference Prefect co-hosts with Pydantic.

Stephen O'Grady has spent 20+ years at RedMonk tracking what developers actually adopt — not what the hype cycle says they should. In this conversation from the MCP Dev Summit, he breaks down why MCP became the fastest de facto standard he's ever measured, why "SaaS is dead" is laughable, and what really happens to your infrastructure when one developer turns into a swarm of twenty.