the hub and its tools

a script could drive one bot. then i wanted to drive a fleet. a hub — a server the bots register with, so i could talk to many of them from one place instead of each one alone. the hub grew out of the bot surface the same way the bot had grown out of the shim

a control plane

the hub answered when a bot was ready, and could start and stop its services. it spoke the protocol i'd built the year before over websockets — the live line from the kanban board, grown up. one server, many bots, state that moves on its own. the pieces of the apprenticeship were starting to fit, though i didn't call it that at the time

tools over a channel

then the model interface showed up. i'd built a chat that reached into the world, and a terminal cli for talking to a model. the natural join was to let a model call the bots' abilities as tools — not just talk about them, but use them. typed, self-describing tools, reachable from a conversation

that's where mcp came in: a way to expose what the hub does as tools any model can call. i'd tinkered with an mcp tool server earlier in the year, on a whim. now the same idea was the way the whole system worked

通 is to connect. the hub connected the bots, and the tools connected the model to them. i wasn't following a blueprint — i kept noticing that things connected well, and building on it