Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats 973: The Web’s Next Form: MCP UI (with Kent C. Dodds)
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Jan 26, 2026 
Kent C. Dodds, full-time educator and dev behind Epic React/Web/AI, walks through Model Context Protocol and MCP UI. Short, punchy takes on context engineering, avoiding context bloat, dynamic tool discovery, and returning interactive HTML widgets. They debate chat vs browser, developer workflows for MCP servers, and practical examples like Sentry and personal MediaRSS setups.
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MCP Standardizes Context And Tool Calling
- MCP standardizes how agents get contextual data and call external tools so models stop relying on copy-paste context hacks.
- This lets many services (Sentry, GitHub, etc.) expose reusable capabilities to any agent that supports MCP.
Using MCP To Manage Personal RSS Feeds
- Kent built MediaRSS and hooked it to MCP so ChatGPT can inspect and modify his kids' audiobook feeds for him.
- He uses it regularly to ask the agent to add missing books to a child's library.
Context Bloat Requires Dynamic Tool Selection
- Context bloat makes models overweight irrelevant tool descriptions and confuses decisions about which tool to call.
- Dynamic selection of relevant MCP tools per user prompt is becoming essential to avoid that overload.