MCP 101: What It Actually Does

Speaker 0: Hey, everyone. Brian here. I gotta say, I'm super excited for this event. But let's get the intros out of the way, and then we'll dive in. If you're new to Directus, it's a headless CMS and back end that lets you build and manage any kind of data or content.

You design your own data model or connect your existing SQL database. Directus will generate production ready APIs for you, and you get a complete admin app to manage everything on top of that. So let's move on to the main course. Right? This is what you're all here for.

What is MCP? Why is it so freaking hyped? Let's talk about it. Model context protocol or MCP is basically just a way for your AI assistance like Claude or ChatGPT or your IDE like Cursor or Versus Code to connect directly to your tools and data sources. Instead of copying and pasting between ChatGPT and your CMS, the AI, it can talk to Directus directly, and we've built MCP support right into Directus Core.

You enable it in the AI settings, generate an access token for a new user or existing user, connect your favorite AI tools, and you're done. That's it. No middleware, no extra servers to manage, no nothing to deploy. Sounds great. Right?

But what does this actually do, Brian? Well, hey. That's where it gets interesting. Right? There are multiple different use cases depending on your role.

So for content teams, you can import blog posts straight from Google Docs with proper field mapping and not having to waste an hour reformatting the copy. You You can organize hundreds of images that are all named image underscore whatever. Add metadata to the entire asset library without clicking through each file individually, spending a ton of time. For developers, you can quickly prototype data models just by describing what you need. Hey, AI.

Build me a CRM with organizations, contacts, and deals. It will go through and create the collections, set up the relationships for you, the whole thing. Or you can modify your schema on the fly. Hey, I AI. I need a reading time field for all my blog posts and calculate it for my existing articles, set up an automation for that.

Your AI tools work through the existing Directus permissions. So the beautiful thing about this is it can only do what you've allowed it to do. That keeps everything nice and secure, and everything shows up in your activity log. It's basically your normal direct us workflow, just faster, which brings us to what we're showing today. In this showcase, we're going to walk through some real examples, content creation, data modeling, automation, the stuff that people are actually using this for in production.

We're gonna show you what works well, what to watch out for, and how to get the most out of combining Directus with AI. And you'll probably also hear a lot of rabbit puns. So with that, down the rabbit hole we go.