Kevin Western kevinwestern

Trying out LLMs

I believe LLMs will make me a more productive software engineer, but old habits die hard. I wanted to scratch an itch this weekend by answering “What is the Model Context Protocol? How can I use it?”. I used an LLM to do it.

I wanted to try out Claude by building a simple Model Context Protocol (MCP) and having the LLM help me write it. I’ve used Google’s Gemini in the past. I had it generate some statistical functions. It was so good that I immediately paid for the more advanced capabilities. I believe the time it saves is worth my money.

The Model Context Protocol is something new to me. I have been indifferent to LLM-assisted engineering for no particular reason. What is the Model Context Protocol? My naive, limited-experience summary is that it’s a way to dynamically inject data and context to an LLM. Imagine integrating APIs into LLM responses.

The MCP quickstart builds a weather fetching API. I’m not passionate about weather, but

Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

I am kevinwestern on github.
I am kestern (https://keybase.io/kestern) on keybase.
I have a public key ASCQ2RlgTDWHMFGSnMoOQdYSOCwJtWzcc_3SqHoWfrEhDgo

To claim this, I am signing this object:

tmux shortcuts & cheatsheet

start new:

tmux

start new with session name:

tmux new -s myname

[ Launch: Tributary inlet ] 7251821 by kevinwestern

[ Launch: schanges ] 7223700 by kevinwestern

	window.getCSRF = () => document.cookie.split('; ').find(s => s.indexOf('csrf_token') === 0).substring('csrf_token='.length)

	function deleteComment(id) {
	fetch("https://www.reddit.com/svc/shreddit/graphql", {
	"method": "POST",
	"headers": {
	"accept": "application/json",
	"content-type": "application/json",
	},
	"body": JSON.stringify({

	// Calculator.java
	public class Calculator {
	public Calculator() {

	}

	public int add(int num1, int num2) {
	return num1 + num2;
	}
	}

	// Code goes here

	var myApp = angular.module('myApp', ['ngResource']);

	myApp.factory('indexedDB', ['$window', '$q', function($window, $q) {
	var version = 2;
	var indexedDB = $window.indexedDB;
	var request = indexedDB.open('myapp', version);
	var db = null;
	var defer = $q.defer();

	function thisIsOk() {
	var name = getName();
	var age = getAge();
	if (age < 21) {
	console.log("You're too young!");
	} else {
	console.log("Come on in!");
	}
	}

	var app = angular.module('apm', ['apm.controller']);

	app.config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider) {
	alert('test');
	$routeProvider.when('/', {
	controller: 'HomeCtrl',
	template: '/static/templates/home.ng'
	}).otherwise({redirectTo: '/'});
	}]);