Uber generated MCP tools from service contracts

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 29:42

   Oh, yeah. I think the other backstory was around, I think, early 2025. 5 we started like as cursor kind of picked up like we enabled cursor and mcp was um was any was a spec that was like created around that time and we quickly realized that hey the power of we can really increase the power of ai by exposing all of our internal tools in an easy way across things so then then we could potentially leverage this beyond just coding we could leverage it for all kinds of software engineering tasks. So around April of 2025, we started working on like MCP gateway, like you know similar to model gateway. This is one gateway for all of the tools.

2. 30:30

   So what we did was because we already had good ideal registry across all of our services, whether they're using Thrift or Proto, since we have the ideal specs, we auto-generate the MCP specs for any of these services. And just to add, I guess, we also don't know, like Uber services either emit thrift or product buffers as strong contracts, right? Yeah. And like we, initially we had just thrift and later we added support for protobuf as well.

3. 30:59

   But all of the new services in the last few years, they're all protobuf. The ones that were created like a few years back, they're all in thrift. And as they go through rewrites, usually like team switch to proto but whether they're in thrift or proto like we we would have we since we have all of the ideals in the in one single registry we could use that registry to generate a default mcp spec for them so they could anyone in the company they can go to this tool mcp gateway they can see all of the mcp servers that we auto generated and if you go to any of that you could see all of the tools that were generated from that existing api so these might be the apis from those services that are projected as mcp tools and we auto generate we auto generate the request pack response pack the descriptions later we also based on the api descriptions you

4. 31:57

   generate llm optimized descriptions for the api sand fields so that we can like we don't like there We saw some tools with like 3,000, 4,000 tokens, so then we can optimize it for model consumption. And it is just one single config and security policy change, and then they can enable it. They don't have to do any code changes. If they want any custom MCP, they can always lose. We have like a framework for creating a custom MCP and proxy their custom MCP also through MCP gateway.

5. 32:28

   The other interesting thing we did was even all of our vendor tools, whether it's Google, Slack, all of them are also exposed through MCP gateway. This reduced a lot of burden on configuration management since we always spoke about AI effects, right? So I could install any of the tools in the same manner, whether it's internal MCP tools or external MCP tools. In the last few months, we also projected all of these MCPs as CLIs. So you could execute any MCP as a CLI. So then if some agentic hardness wants to use it as CLI, they can use it as CLI. If they want to use traditional MCP, they can use MCP. And do I understand that this all comes because the APIs to start with were already either generated or written in, like a lot of them were generated, you already had a platform for the APIs, so

6. 33:20

   adding MCP was somewhat, I mean, trivial, of course it's work, but you know what I mean. And now generating CLI is also somewhat trivial because you had a foundation before AI, right? And so when you have it, that's what I'm starting to see with Uber. You built a bunch of stuff before 2022 and you could just add AI infra pretty easily on it. Yeah, and the same team that works on our API Gateway also worked on MCP Gateway. So they're already in the business of building API Gateway.

7. 33:50

   So they know how to do any kind of protocol transformations, any kind of any kind of vpi gateways so it was like we were able to pretty quickly build this um so i think this was probably like uh especially once we got our google workspace and all of our slack tools also into this it kind of like created all kinds of like amazing agentive workflows people could automate anything right at that point like from slack to google jira linear like any any tool vendor tool or any internal service is you are at a CLI call away and then the other set of