Chapter 2 -- The 50-Day Plan For Building A Personal Assistant Agentic System (PAAS)

PHASE 3: ADVANCED AGENT CAPABILITIES (Days 26-40)

Day 26-28: Anthropic MCP Integration

These three days will focus on integrating with Anthropic's Message Conversation Protocol (MCP), enabling sophisticated interactions with Claude and other Anthropic models. You'll learn how MCP works at a technical level, understanding its message formatting requirements and capability negotiation system. You'll develop components that can effectively communicate with Anthropic models, leveraging their strengths for different aspects of your intelligence gathering system. You'll also create integration points between the MCP and your multi-agent architecture, enabling seamless cooperation between different AI systems. Throughout, you'll implement these capabilities using Rust for performance and type safety.

  • Morning (3h): Study Anthropic's Message Conversation Protocol

    • MCP specification: Master the details of Anthropic's MCP format, including message structure, metadata fields, and formatting conventions that enable effective model interactions. Create Rust data structures that accurately represent MCP messages with proper validation, using Rust's type system to enforce correct message formatting at compile time.
    • Message formatting: Learn best practices for structuring prompts and messages to Anthropic models, understanding how different formatting approaches affect model responses. Implement a Rust-based template system for generating well-structured prompts with appropriate context and instructions for different intelligence gathering tasks.
    • Capability negotiation: Understand how capability negotiation works in MCP, allowing models to communicate what functions they can perform and what information they need. Develop Rust components that implement the capability discovery protocol, using traits to define clear interfaces between your system and Anthropic models.

  • Afternoon (3h): Implement Anthropic MCP with Rust

    • Set up Claude integration: Build a robust Rust client for Anthropic's API that handles authentication, request formation, and response parsing with proper error handling and retry logic. Implement connection pooling and rate limiting in Rust to ensure efficient use of API quotas while maintaining responsiveness.
    • Implement MCP message formatting: Create a type-safe system for generating and parsing MCP messages in Rust, with validation to ensure all messages adhere to the protocol specification. Develop serialization methods that efficiently convert between your internal data representations and the JSON format required by the MCP.
    • Build capability discovery system: Implement a capability negotiation system in Rust that can discover what functions Claude and other models can perform, adapting your requests accordingly. Create a registry of capabilities that tracks which models support which functions, allowing your system to route requests to the most appropriate model based on task requirements.