Episode 51: Why We Built an MCP Server and What Broke First

Vanishing Gradients

What does it take to actually ship LLM-powered features, and what breaks when you connect them to real production data?

In this episode, we hear from Philip Carter — then a Principal PM at Honeycomb and now a Product Management Director at Salesforce. In early 2023, he helped build one of the first LLM-powered SaaS features to ship to real users. More recently, he and his team built a production-ready MCP server.

We cover:
• How to evaluate LLM systems using human-aligned judges
• The spreadsheet-driven process behind shipping Honeycomb’s first LLM feature
• The challenges of tool usage, prompt templates, and flaky model behavior
• Where MCP shows promise, and where it breaks in the real world

If you’re working on LLMs in production, this one’s for you!

LINKS

• So We Shipped an AI Product: Did it Work? by Philip Carter
• Vanishing Gradients YouTube Channel
  
• Upcoming Events on Luma
• Hugo's recent newsletter about upcoming events and more!

🎓 Learn more:

• Hugo's course: Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers — next cohort starts July 8: https://maven.com/s/course/d56067f338

📺 Watch the video version on YouTube: YouTube link