MCP Hello Page

We've started offering an MCP Server for our main $WORK tool. It's been fun, like a weird intersection between deterministic and non-deterministic worlds Despite the fact that MCP is an utterly terrible attempt at a "specification", we have hit one annoying issue: customers keep on reporting the MCP server is not working.

The reason is simple and it shows the friction between devs vibe-coding a spec and real-world users actually onboarding: if you open mcp.acme.com/mcp in a browser you get a big fat 401 and a raw JSON blob saying Unauthorized. (If authentication isn't required, adjust accordingly.)

This is a pain because users open the link, see the error, and immediately drop a support ticket saying the link isn't working. It's not working though because they need to paste it into their client of choice, but no-one thinks that far ahead. The (annoying) solution is to package our server up into a connector/plugin and release it for each and every LLM client out there. This is slow, painful, and a never ending game of whack-a-mole as we have a lot of customers starting to make their own clients embedded within their orgs.