MCP

Every week, an automation pulls PagerDuty data and writes a trends report — top services, alert noise by rotation. Humans read it at the weekly review and adjust priorities. The report goes into Notion or the team wiki. A week later, someone asks an agent — “what are the recent PD trends?” The agent has MCP access to both PagerDuty and the team’s docs. Retrieval finds the report. It matches the query perfectly: same words, polished structure, topical headings. The agent answers from the report. ...

The same triage agent running on your laptop and running server-side off an alert webhook looks like the same agent — but how much agency you give the LLM should be completely different on each side. Locally, you should let the LLM stretch out: hand it the MCPs you’ve set up for investigation, let it pick which tool to call, let it choose its own path, let it backtrack and try a different hypothesis. Discovery is a feature. You’re standing right there — every step shows up on your screen, and you can redirect at any time. ...

Most AI agent setups that disappoint their teams don’t disappoint because the model is wrong. They disappoint because the agent was asked to reason about systems it can’t see. A triage agent without PagerDuty access produces a vague analysis. An on-call agent without metrics hallucinates a root cause from alert titles. The agent isn’t bad; it’s undercontexted. Context engineering is the long game, and it has a structure. Specifically, it has four techniques — not a staircase. Each one matches a different shape of context source, and which ones apply depends on what you already have. A team with a CLI-heavy internal stack will spend most of its effort on technique 3. A team whose vendors all expose public MCPs might never touch technique 2. What remains true, regardless, is that technique 4 — bundling — is what turns any subset of the others into a team asset. ...