Till Döhmen , engineer at MotherDuck, breaks down what it actually takes to build MCP servers that work — and it's not just writing good tool descriptions. At MCP Summit NYC, he shares how MotherDuck approaches context engineering, tests end-to-end with real clients, and what common mistakes he sees in production MCP servers.
Topics covered:
- What context engineering in MCP servers actually means
- How MotherDuck tests context trimming and when accuracy drops
- Why end-to-end testing with the client in the loop matters
- Real internal use cases: non-technical users querying a data warehouse via MCP
- The problem with MCP servers returning too much content
- Tool overload: what happens when an MCP server has 50+ tools
- Why putting workflow instructions inside tool descriptions feels wrong — but is often necessary
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