Give Your Agent Tools Using MCP

Chapter 3 of the Building AI Agent Harnesses with Strands Agents course. This chapter covers MCP and how it changes the way you think about equipping your agent with capabilities. MCP is a standard protocol that lets your agent connect to external tool servers the same way every time. Instead of writing a custom wrapper for each API, database, or service you want your agent to access, you point it at an MCP server and the tools become available automatically. The agent sees the tool names, descriptions, and schemas, and calls them like any other tool in its harness. This course teaches developers how to build AI agents and agent harnesses using the open-source Strands Agents SDK. The course starts by teaching what the difference between an agent and agent harness is, and progresses from fundamental concepts (the agent loop, model providers, tools) through intermediate patterns (hooks, plugins, steering, conversation management) to advanced multi-agent orchestration (agents-as-tools, graph workflows, agent swarms) and finally production operations (guardrails, observability, evaluation, cloud deployment). Github Repo with Readings: https://go.aws/4vUQWzg Strands Agents SDK: https://go.aws/4vUQWPM Follow AWS Developers! 🆇 X: https://go.aws/4aJltYd 💼 LinkedIn: https://go.aws/4foFBS8 #AWS #AgentHarness #StrandsAgents