Building an MCP server — lessons from thunderbit-mcp

When we started building thunderbit-mcp , the plan sounded straightforward: expose Thunderbit's web extraction API to AI coding agents through the Model Context Protocol. In practice, the hard parts were not the SDK calls. The hard parts were product-shaped: How many tools should the server expose? What should a tool return when a page is blocked, slow, or only partially extracted? Should the server run locally over stdio, remotely over HTTP, or both? How much should the LLM decide, and how much