Building Intelligent Apps with Claude: Tools, MCP, and Skills

An intermediate-to-advanced practitioner guide to architecting AI assistants that call custom-built tools, spanning the raw tool-use primitive, FastAPI and FastMCP tool servers, Claude Skills, the Agent SDK, production design patterns, and a full capstone assistant.

Textbook

Read the full textbook Long-form companion to the chapter guides →

Chapter Guides

  1. 1 Foundations: The Agent Loop and the Tool-Use Primitive
  2. 2 Building Tools with FastAPI: Schemas, Orchestration, Streaming, Errors
  3. 3 Building Tools with FastMCP — Servers, Tools, Resources, Prompts, Transports
  4. 4 Claude Skills — SKILL.md, Progressive Disclosure, and Bundled Scripts
  5. 5 The Agent SDK: Multi-Turn Assistants, Memory, and Sub-Agents
  6. 6 Design Patterns and Production: Auth, Idempotency, Retries, Observability, Testing, Cost
  7. 7 Chapter 7 — Capstone: A Worked Intelligent Assistant on a Custom FastMCP Tool Server