How I built an MCP server for 27 government registries in a week

I built an MCP server for 27 government registries, and the first thing I learned was that the hardest part is not the transport layer. It is all the tiny differences in company identifiers, search behavior, and what each registry actually returns on a bad query. This week I wired the server so Claude Desktop can ask one question and get back a source-linked result instead of a scraped summary. The useful bit is not that it "works". It is that each registry keeps its own quirks, and the server n