Welcome to The Weekly Wisdom
Edition #6 - 12 Jun 2025
Topic tags - mcp
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Hey all! 
@lizhennessy here from the Apollo Education team. I’m a Developer Educator and I build courses for Odyssey, our official learning platform.
I’m back again with another bite of MCP: this week, we’ll give you a rundown on MCP server tools.
This week’s learning: What are MCP server tools?
In an MCP server, tools are the predefined actions an AI assistant can access and execute. Behind the scenes, each tool maps back to some functionality, such as executing a query against a GraphQL API.
But what the server exposes to the assistant is just the tool’s name, description, any required inputs and some optional annotations. No backend implementation details! This is all the information an assistant needs to “understand” what each tool is about.
Want to go deeper?
Tools are a great way to package backend functionality in a squeaky clean wrapper. But there’s a lot more we can do in GraphOS to empower an AI assistant. With introspection and contracts, an assistant can devise its own queries to run. Join us in TBD COURSE to supercharge your assistants’ flexibility without compromising system security.
Check out the Getting Started with MCP and GraphQL course on Odyssey. We’ll hook up an AI assistant with some tools using the Apollo MCP server, and power up our automated customer interactions.
Share your thoughts in the thread below 
What are your biggest concerns with AI integrations? Are there other ways you’ve gone about preventing assistant “hallucinations” or overreach? Let us know in the comments!