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.

Instead, I did something a little bit hacky: if the request is for GET /mcp and the Accept header includes text/html and NOT application/json or text/event-stream, I return a HTML page explaining to the user they're trying to view an mcp server and they need to add it to their client.

Number of tickets has dropped off a cliff, CS is happy, customers are getting setup a lot more quickly, and I don't have to explain that not all errors are errors. Wins all 'round, and no impact from what we can observe.

I wish the spec had some capability to mitigate for this but alas, like all things in this AI-era, it's a case of move fast and hope the AI can fix bugs faster.

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"The MCP spec is more like guidelines than an actual specification."

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