Nick Winder
188 posts
Launching today: Nutrient Data Extraction API. Parse PDFs, scans, images, and Office files into spatial JSON or Markdown — with coordinates, confidence, and page context. Built for AI agents, RAG, search, automation, and human review. nutrient.io/api/data-extra…
you literally cannot vibe code c++ char is an 8 bit string that can also be an unsigned 8 bit int depending on how you use it. the level of precision required to write c++ is too high for vibecoding. there are just too many quirks in the language.
Gemini 3.5 is 30x more expensive than 1.5
If your MCP server has dozens of tools, it’s probably built wrong. You need tools that are specific and clear for each use case—but you also can’t have too many. This creates an almost impossible tradeoff that most companies don’t know how to solve. That’s why I interviewed my friend Alex Rattray (@RattrayAlex), the founder and CEO of @StainlessAPI. Stainless builds APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers for companies like @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI. Alex has spent years mastering how to make software talk to software, and he came on the show to share what he knows. I had him on @every’s AI & I to talk about MCP and the future of the AI-native internet. We get into: • Design MCP servers to be lean and precise. Alex’s best practices for building reliable MCP servers start with keeping the toolset small, giving each tool a precise name and description, and minimizing the inputs and outputs the model has to handle. At Stainless, they also often add a JSON filter on top to strip out unnecessary data. • Make complex APIs manageable with dynamic mode. To solve the problem of how an AI figures out which tool to use in larger APIs, Stainless switches to “dynamic mode,” where the model gets only three tools: List the endpoints, pick one and learn about it, and then execute it. • MCP servers as business copilots. At Stainless, Alex uses MCP servers to connect tools like @NotionHQ and @HubSpot, so he can ask questions like, “Which customers signed up last week?” The system queries multiple databases and returns a summary that would’ve otherwise taken multiple logins and searches. • Create a “brain” for your company with Claude Code. Alex built a shared company brain at Stainless by keeping Claude Code running on his system and asking it to save useful inputs—like customer feedback and SQL queries—into GitHub. Over time, this creates a curated archive his team can query easily. • The future of MCP is code execution. Instead of giving models hundreds of tools, Alex believes the most powerful setup will be a simple code execution tool and a doc search tool. The AI writes code against an API’s SDK, runs it on a server, and checks the docs when it gets stuck. This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to understand MCP—and learn how to use them as a competitive edge. Watch below! Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:14 Why Alex likes running barefoot: 00:02:54 APIs and MCP, the connectors of the new internet: 00:05:09 Why MCP servers are hard to get right: 00:10:53 Design principles for reliable MCP servers: 00:20:07 Scaling MCP servers for large APIs: 00:23:50 Using MCP for business ops at Stainless: 00:25:14 Building a company brain with Claude Code: 00:28:12 Where MCP goes from here: 00:33:59 Alex’s take on the security model for MCP: 00:41:10
