mcp-connect-amsterdam-notes

Notes from MCP Connect Amsterdam (March 2026) exploring the Model Context Protocol, agentic workflows, and real-world trade-offs in production. Focused on orchestration, onboarding, and scaling AI systems.

The week before this event, posts were circulating declaring MCP finished. A Y Combinator partner shared a hot take. A prominent open-source developer called it over-engineered middleware. The Fast MCP team announced they were holding a funeral in New York on April 1st.

Then 100+ people showed up to an evening event in Amsterdam to talk about it.

Make of that what you will.

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This repo contains my notes, takeaways, and resources from MCP Connect Amsterdam, hosted at AI House Amsterdam (Zuidas) and co-organised by GitHub, Alpic, Orq.ai, and Prosus.

> *I'm not an engineer but a proud vibey coder ;) I'm an ecosystem operator embedded in the European innovation ecosystem and Amsterdam's deeptech scene. I took notes, went down rabbit holes, and wrote up what stayed with me. If anything here is useful to you, great.*

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This question landed in the OpenAI developer forum the same week as the event. A developer building MCP Apps for ChatGPT hit two production bugs: the host strips _meta from tool results (breaking state persistence), and widgets don't survive a page refresh. Their conclusion: the platform is "essentially unusable for production apps." Their question: keep investing and wait for fixes, or move back to window.openai?

It's a fair question, and it points to a real tension. The MCP Apps spec leaves implementation details to each host. Claude and VS Code s