Building a School Library Assistant with FastMCP and DSPy (II)

The last time I dived into building a toy MCP service for a school library assistant, which helps you search for books, borrow copies, and return them. I quickly realized this wasn’t practical. Without authentication and authorization, the service was only useful for an administrator with full access.

What if we want to expose a real service? Security needs to be a first-class citizen.

MCP service itself is not that mysterious. It’s essentially built upon HTTP protocol with an extra layer of protocol and formatting. We can leverage all the concept for building security for HTTP services, like TLS, OAuth, etc. With the FastMCP framework we can extend the Authn/Authz, just like the Python backend development process.

This is a toy implementation, but I think can demo the basic ideas for MCP service and LLM integration.

Code here: https://github.com/hxy9243/agents/tree/main/librarian

See last blog: https://blog.kevinhu.me/2025/08/09/Building-MCP-with-DSPy/

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Building a School Library Assistant with FastMCP and DSPy (I)

Recently I’ve been looking into MCP and how it integrates with development framework. I tried with some hands-on tinkering, and learned quite a bit. Here’s my learning and some reflections.

Code here: https://github.com/hxy9243/agents/tree/main/librarian

What’s MCP

Bird’s Eye View

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard way for AI agents to securely connect to your services. It provides a uniform interface for tools, resources, and prompts, enabling seamless integration between AI systems and external services.

Clients like VSCode, Gemini Code, or Claude Code can now integrate with different tools and services and become incredibly powerful, from reading PDFs, search for websites, read your Google Drive files, or book plane tickets for you. You could implement the MCP service once and easily install in all kinds of the AI assistants of your choice.

With this standardization, you can implement your MCP server and they can directly integrate with your user’s agents, assistants, or more complicated workflows. They can call and leverage your tools with a standardized interface.

Think of an AppStore moment for app discovery and AI integration.

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