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