The experiment with building an MCP server continues, with some hacking on it happening over a couple of hours while killing time in an Edinburgh coffee shop.

It is, of course, a solution looking for a problem, and I suspect I'm the only person who will ever use it, and even then only as a test, but building it is proving interesting.

The main changes in v0.2.0 are:

  • I turned the current search_guide tool into a line_search_guide tool (because that's what it was doing: a line-by-line search).
  • I added a body_search_guide tool that treats all the lines in an entry as a single block of text and then does the search in that (so searches over line breaks will work).
  • I added a read_entry_source tool that, rather than rendering the entry of a guide as plain text with all the markup removed, it instead delivers the underlying "source" for the entry; something that could be useful if you wanted to get an agent to convert it into another marked-up body of text.
  • I added a markup glossary resource, which technically tells an agent everything it needs to know about Norton Guide markup.

The latter one is interesting. I added it and did some experimenting locally and it seemed to be helpful and I could ask questions about markup and Copilot seemed to use it. Meanwhile, having installed v0.2.0 globally on my machine, and having enabled it, I'm finding that Copilot seems to have zero clue about the markup and instead is using the server to go off and read the guides to work out the markup1.

On the other hand, the new "get source" tool seems to work a treat.

Peeking at the source for an entry

So I suspect I still have some reading/experimenting to do when it comes to resources, so I can better understand why I'd want to provide them and what problem they solve.

  1. All credit to it: it did find CREATING.NG and read the markup out of that. ↩