Getting Started with MCP Servers: A Beginner's Guide

What’s an MCP server?

Okay, so MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It’s basically a way to let AI tools (like chatbots or virtual assistants) connect with other programs or data—like files on your computer, your calendar, or even apps like Google Drive or Slack.

Before this, if you wanted an AI to do something like check your calendar or read a document, the developer had to build a custom connection just for that one thing. It took a lot of time and effort.

MCP makes this easier. It’s like giving the AI a universal plug so it can talk to all sorts of services using the same setup. Instead of building everything from scratch, you just follow the MCP format and it works with anything that supports it.

The MCP server is the thing that sits between the AI and the app or data source. It listens for requests from the AI and then goes and gets the info or performs the task, like opening a file or sending a message.

Developers can build these servers using ready-made tools (called SDKs) in popular coding languages like Python or JavaScript. There are even pre-made examples online you can use or learn from.

Why is MCP useful?

One of the biggest problems when building AI tools is that every app or service is different. If you want your AI to pull info from Google Drive, or access someone’s local files, or talk to some API, you usually have to build a separate connection for each one. And that’s a lot of work—especially when you're working with different tools, languages, or frameworks.

That’s where the Model Context Protocol comes in. Its main goal is to standardize how AI connects to external stuff.

So instead of writing new code every time, developers follow the same structure. It’s like everyone agreeing on one common way to talk to the AI. That means once you've set it up, it doesn’t really matter what the tool or system is, or what language it’s written in. If it supports MCP, it just works.

This is super helpful because it makes everything more consistent and predictable. Whether you’re using JavaScript, Python, or anything else—if you're following MCP, your AI knows what to expect.

And if you’re building tools for AI, you can focus on what your server actually does—like getting files, sending data, or doing calculations—instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

So yeah, the magic of MCP is in the standard. It keeps everything organized, saves a lot of time, and makes AI way easier to hook up to real-world tools.

Hugging Face MCP

Now we're gonna start building our very first MCP server. We're gonna start with one which is made for Hugging Face Spaces. What it does is it connects Claude AI to Hugging Face Spaces. For example, here we have Claude that uses the Flux model to create an image. If you've never heard about Hugging Face, basically it's like a big collection of open source AI models. If we go to their model page, you can see all the available models. Here we have DeepSeek, their latest model is 3.1. You have Qwen, another AI from China. And then we have Sesame, the text-to-speech, which is really good in conversation. Mistral, an AI from a French company. Here's Flux1, that's what the example was showing.

And it's not just about LLMs. Hugging Face has all kinds of models that do all kinds of tasks. For example, this one creates vectors from images or text. If you scroll down, you can see the model architecture and how it works under the hood. This is really good for open source AI research. Inside Hugging Face, we have something called Spaces. Spaces is what allows us to test the AI models, and this is what the MCP server that we're going to install is going to leverage. Here you see all the spaces where you could try these models. For example, LHM takes a reference image and a reference motion and combines the two. We can click on their project to see their project page and how it works.

Here we have their page showing how it works with some demonstrations. We have a reference image and the reference motion. It then combines the two into a 3D character. Again you have a reference with a motion - it detects the motion and puts the reference image on top of it and creates a 3D model. So it's really good.

You can see that there are all kinds of models on Hugging Face. With all these models and spaces available, you can really see the potential with this MCP server - Claude AI has access to all of these spaces and basically has so much more potential.

Keep in mind that in Hugging Face, if you use models that use a lot of resources like for video, then you're going to need to have some credit or pay for some credit to test it out. But if you're just using image generation or transcriptions, then that's fine. If you want to test out some video work, you can buy some credits for it.

For example, we have this Flux model here in this space. What the MCP does is it connects the Claude AI to this space in particular. We just enter a prompt and it's going to generate the image, and Claude AI will have full context of this.