Context and Skills Are All Your Agent Needs

Two-day training session on AI agents, MCP, and Skills facilitated by Aleksander Stensby from GritAI. This training gives you the foundation to build MCP servers and MCP Apps, reusable agent skills, and wire everything into capable autonomous agents that actually work.

This hands-on workshop will equip you with practical skills to build your own MCP servers, CLI tool wrappers, and interactive MCP Apps — and then go further by creating reusable skills that turn simple tool-calling agents into capable, autonomous systems. You'll leave with a working agent powered by tools and skills you built yourself.

Key Topics

Day 1: Context & Connectivity — MCP Servers, Apps & Tools

• Introduction to the AI agent stack: LLMs in a loop with tools and why context is king
• Core MCP concepts: Host/client/server architecture, tools, resources, and prompts
• Building a working local MCP server (Python or TypeScript)
• MCP Apps: Adding interactive UI components to your MCP Server
• CLI tools with direct API access as an alternative and complement to MCP
• Hands-on exercises: Build an MCP server, extend it with an MCP App

Day 2: Skills, Agents & Capability

• What skills are and why they're the missing layer in most agent setups
• Skills vs. tools vs. prompts: Understanding the capability stack
• The skill creator pattern: Using AI to capture and formalise skills from workflows
• Workflow capture: Turning expert knowledge into reusable agent skills
• Agentic loop architecture: How LLMs, tools, and skills combine across frameworks
• Provider-agnostic patterns: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini and beyond
• Final exercise: Building a capable agent combining MCP tools and custom skills

Prerequisites

• Basic Python or JavaScript programming knowledge
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts (helpful but not required)
• Laptop with necessary development environment

This training is targeted at developers and people with a medium+ technical skill level and interest for AI.

Computer setup
Bring your laptop with your preferred IDE and either Python or Node installed. We recommend an AI coding agent like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot.
Bring your favorite sauce! You need access to an LLM provider like Anthropic, OpenAI or Azure Foundry, but you can also use Ollama if you would like to run everything locally and free. Claude Code is highly recommended and will be used for a lot of the demonstrations during the workshop.