Writing an MCP

30 Mar 2026

The whole world is transitioning over to using AI for more and more things, so obviously we need Yeltzland to be on the cutting edge and make sure users can get Halesowen Town results in this new, exciting future 😁

Reusing existing Alexa code

A while back - when this was all the rage - I wrote an Alexa skill

You can ask it about the latest score, who do we play next etc. by basically fetching the fixtures/results data I maintain for the mobile apps, and then parsing it into a response suitable for a voice assistant.

Clearly in theory I should just be able to port this logic into a MCP service - the emerging standard for integrating with API assistants.

Using AI to write the code

This also seemed an ideal task for an AI coding agent to do the actual work of getting it ported to an AI-friendly format.

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot Pro for a while, it fits well into my workflow at a reasonable cost (currently $10 per month)

I set it the task to port the existing Alexa skill code into an MCP service I could run on AWS Lambda, and after a few iterations it did a pretty good job.

The service logic itself is almost completely reused, but the new code is around specific MCP support - which isn’t super-obvious how to do when running as a Lambda function.

Interestingly the first iterations worked, but were quite verbose as they weren’t using the latest MCP packages - which meant the coding agent wrote some of those new features itself.

A common occurrence out of the box as they can never be completely up to date out of the box without some help.

I pointed the agent to the latest documentation specifically, and instructed it to use the latest package, and it then did a nice job of refactoring the code to make it much more understandable and readable to this puny human.

Product Engineering

I think this is a perfect example of how the job of being a software engineer is changing right under our feet. We not really “coders” any more- although I’d strongly argue that was never what we were

Tim Checkley from Loomery - who I worked with recently - summarised this perfectly in a great post recently, that the role is being transitioned to being a “Product Engineer”.

An understanding of user needs, as well of what is possible rather than just how to code them, will be far more important going forward than it is now I strongly urge everyone to give this a read

Installation Instructions

If you want to give this MCP a go, there are full instructions on how to set it up at https://bravelocation.com/mcp-instructions - AI generated of course

Programming note

The text written here is the only thing not AI generated, so any nonsense, spelling mistakes or gramattical errors are all down to me. The terrible summary image was made by Chat GPT based on the post (has that glorious “Made for LinkedIn” look 🤣)