swiss_meteo_mcp

This is an experimental project to learn about MCP + GitHub Copilot, using the latter to create the MCP server code and then access it through the Chat funciton of copilot. I also managed to use the MCP server through Amazon Q chat (see further below).

Journey

I prompted the goal as stated above for an initial pass.
After uvicorn was used wrongly in the .vscode/mcp.json config, which is for http endpoints, not for stdio ones, debugging back and forth with copilot fixed the issue and I had a running MCP server scaffolded (that were unrelated to swiss meteo):
Availabilities:
- prompt to summarise text, which could either be detailed or brief (/mcp.swiss-meteo-mcp.summarize-notes ).
- tool to add a note (#add-note).
- resource to list notes, not accessible explicitly (just implicitly) through copilot chat.
One can see below that it works as expected, with autocompletion, after the server was started:

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I wanted to add a tool to get the current weather from swiss meteo (hence the name of the package), but there is no official API I found out with copilot chat.
I then asked for a few alternatives and decided to go with wttr.io and let copilot implement it.
I also factored out some functionality so I could let copilot write a simple unit test that worked.
So my own new tool is #get-temperature

Lessons Learned

in general

Building an MPC server seems a standard task. GitHub Copilot managed kind of well, but not flawless.
Integration of mcp servers is working well with copilot it seems.
Invocation of tools and resources is possible implicitly or explicitly. When used, it is communicated transparently in the copilot chat.
MCP servers can run locally (with like uv run or container isolation) or remotely.
MCP prompts are really just parametrised snippets.
resources are read-only info.
tools are supposed to have side effects.

GitHub Copilot

can also write git commit messages (not so impressive)
used 20% of free code suggestions in one day (and might be used for retraining).

Amazon Q

Can discover MCP server in .vscode/mcp.json in own project, start it when a relevant question is asked in the Q chat and use the tool to answer the question, but using Python source package not MCP tool over stdio.
to use the mcp server outside the source repo, we had to put the mcp.json file into the amazon q global directory at ~/.aws/amazonq/mcp/mcp.json and rename the servers: key to mcpServers: for Q to recognise it:

{ "mcpServers": { "swiss-meteo-mcp3": { "type": "stdio", # not portable, most mcp servers use uvx run [pypiname.module@latest] to install on fly and run "command": "/Users/lorenz/git/swiss_meteo_mcp/.venv/bin/python", "args": [ "-m", "swiss_meteo_mcp.server" ] } } }

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