Show HN: A “Course” as an MCP Server
25 comments
·June 10, 2025Gorath
This was interesting, but continues to shatter the illusion for me that LLM based programming is vastly superior to someone not using an LLM. It consistently struggled for me to set up what it was trying to do, and had little context in helping me work through issues. I was using windsurf so maybe that was part of my issue? I gave up in part two when it got in a never ending loop trying to connect to the GitHub mcp.
keeganpoppen
somehow i hadn’t heard of mastra given that i’ve gone out of my way to find and try basically every framework in this vein under the sun, but i gotta say: i’m quite impressed in terms of how clean it is and how well it aligns with i would consider “real” work in this arena… so many of these frameworks try way too hard to be batteries included and/or are otherwise so simple / limited as to feel like they were made by people who don’t actually… “get” it and thus that by extension its users don’t either…
flippyhead
I've been using Mastra for a few months now and we've really been liking it. Team is super responsive and a lot of improvements are afoot.
codekarate
thanks for checking mastra out
if you do find things that need improvement, please let us know in our discord or on x!
hofo
Newbie here: how much of creating agents are portable from one AI platform to another? Do they mostly have the same concepts but differ slightly in implementation? Or something else?
codekarate
The concepts are pretty similar but this course is definitely pretty Mastra specific.
If you are looking for a more general overview on agent development, my co-founder wrote a short book (available free at https://mastra.ai/book)
jsemrau
Most agent frameworks implement a ReAct (Reflect->Act) pattern in the form of a loop that "reasons" until a "final_answer" has been found. Most framworks also implement some form of session cache (scratchpad), tool use, and thought logging/tracing.
While most implementations are similar they are not easily transferable.
djfivyvusn
MCP is portable but isn't very useful for creating agent workflows.
tmaly
This is very cool. I have to figure out a good 7B model to run on LM Studio that can interact with this.
jcmontx
How does the course actually start? I installed it for Cursor. npm run dev. I open a playground and...?
thawab
Start course. It’s an mcp, talk to it like an instructor.
davecyen
This is really cool. I used the OG Codecademy to learn how to code, this is kind of like the next-gen version of that.
codekarate
Thanks!
I definitely remember spending time on Codecademy years ago
justanotheratom
make a video on how to "take" this course
thawab
There are several videos in the link that does this.
ninkendo
Seeing the title I had the opposite assumption of what it was referring to: I thought of the interface to getting homework, taking tests, submitting assignments, etc as an MCP server and watching an LLM fully pass a course from an online university autonomously. I’m not convinced this isn’t possible today.
avipeltz
yall have been cooking ;) does the course also go through making a workflow or just an agent?
codekarate
it currently only covers creating an agent, adding tools/mcp, and agent memory
later this week we will be releasing a workflows lesson
nilsbunger
While we are talking about workflows, can you show an example of workflow integration with copilotkit?
avipeltz
nice looking forward to it :)
hoppp
The website doesn't look good on mobile
codekarate
thanks, we will get this fixed asap
null
We wanted to build a course for new Mastra devs to get started quickly. However, we knew videos would go out of date and be more difficult to maintain.
We decided to launch our "course" as an MCP server. This way your coding agent actually teaches the course content to you and can help you write the code. We think this is a really interactive way to learn.
Using an editor with MCP support (such as Cursor, Windsurf, or VSCode), your code agent will call the appropriate MCP tools which will return context for the agent. This context tries to instruct the agent that it should be teaching you the content, not just doing the work for you.
The course is still pretty experimental and some models work better than others. Code is available in the Mastra Github repo in the mcp-docs-server package (https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra/tree/main/packages/mcp-d...)