Lesson 1 of 30, Module 1: The Whole Idea. You understand what MCP is, why it exists, and you have FELT the problem it solves.
What you can do after this lesson
If you cannot explain what you built to a friend in under a minute without using a single technical word, you have not actually understood it yet.
Downloads
- Module 1 checkpoint (scribe-checkpoint-m1.zip): working code as the module leaves it, so a broken session costs you nothing
- The course GitHub repo: every checkpoint, the README and the full lesson list
Prefer to read?
The written version of this part of the course is on Substack: https://genaiunplugged.substack.com/p/what-is-mcp-model-context-protocol.
Lesson transcript
Watch it fix a real document
Here is a real document sitting in my Google Drive. It has a weak opening line, and it also has 3 spelling mistakes.
I am going to ask Claude to fix the opening and correct the spelling.
You can see that the document changes. I did not copy anything, and I did not paste anything back.
Then I ask for another thing. Turn that finished draft into a Substack newsletter post. A draft appears inside my Substack account a few seconds later.
Well, that is MCP in action for you, sitting in the middle of Claude and Google Drive and Substack.
Hello, and welcome to the MCP Masterclass. My name is Dheeraj.
What you just watched is the last lesson of this course, running. Over the next 30 lessons you are going to build that yourself, from nothing.
And that is the ending of this course. So now let us talk about how you get there.
What you are building
Let's look at what you are going to build through this MCP Masterclass.
Well, you are going to build one small MCP server. We will call it Scribe.
A scribe is somebody who works on documents for you. That is the job here, and hence I named it Scribe.
Scribe sits between AI, Claude in this case, and your own accounts. You write it once, and after that Claude or any other AI can read your drafts, change them, and deliver them where you want. We will deliver them to Substack.
Now, we build Scribe 4 separate times in this course. Every version does a little more than the version before it.
| Version | What Scribe can do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Change a document in your Google Drive folder |
| 2 | Look through the whole folder, and run jobs you saved |
| 3 | Stay inside your folder, and ask before it writes |
| 4 | Deliver to Substack, and run on the internet |
Version 1 changes a document in your Google Drive folder. Version 2 looks through the whole folder and runs jobs you saved. Version 3 stays inside your folder and asks you before it writes. And version 4 delivers to Substack and runs on the internet.
The finished program, or MCP server, is a single Python file. It is still short enough to read in one sitting.
The one minute test
And as always, there is a test I use for everything I teach. Can you explain what you built to a friend in under a minute, without using a single technical word?
Here is that sentence for Scribe.
AI edits the real drafts in my Google Drive, asks before it overwrites anything, remembers my style rules, and turns the finished draft into a Substack post.
If you can say that at the end, and you mean it, then this MCP course worked.
The map we keep coming back to
And here is the map, or a diagram, we will keep coming back to through this course.
Every piece of it appears in lesson 1, and most of those pieces begin the course greyed out.
Right now 6 boxes are lit up. You. Claude Desktop. A second application. The client hiding inside those applications. The pipe between them. And your Google Drive folder along with Substack newsletter, over at the far end.
The box in the middle is empty. That empty box is exactly where the Scribe MCP server is going to sit.
We return to this simple diagram twice in every lesson. Once at the beginning, so you remember where you are. Once at the end, so you can see what changed.
What you do not need
Now, let's look at what this course does not expect from you.
You do not need to be a Python developer. You need to be able to read a short function, and then change a line inside it.
You do not need to pay anybody. Every account we use has a free level that covers this entire course.
You do not need a clever idea. You need one Google Drive folder with a few drafts sitting in it.
Where we go next
So where are we going next?
Module 1 is the whole idea. You will not build Scribe in this module. You will use servers other people wrote, get your computer ready, and try the obvious way first.
And I am deliberate about this approach, because before you learn the better way to do something, it helps enormously to feel why the obvious way lets you down.
The map has not changed yet. 6 boxes lit, and a hole in the middle where your own MCP server is going to appear.
Next lesson we will talk about what this thing called MCP actually is.
Bye now, and I will see you in the next lesson.
