UGC Community Hub2026-07-191 min read
MCP Server Philosophy: Design Principles
The design principles experienced MCP builders keep coming back to, distilled from years of tool schemas and postmortems.
Philosophy discussionsPrinciple voting
Beyond specific patterns, a handful of underlying principles keep showing up in postmortems from teams who've run MCP servers at scale.
Design for the Model, Not the Developer
A tool schema that's elegant to a developer's eye but ambiguous to a model is a bad schema. Write descriptions the way you'd explain the tool to a smart colleague who's never seen your codebase.
Irreversibility Deserves Friction
Anything that can't be undone should require an explicit confirmation step, even if it slows the agent down. Every incident report in this community traces back to skipping this.
Debate the Principles
These aren't settled — add your own in the comments, with the experience that led you to it.