Welcome to Context Shift
MCP, agents, and the context layer nobody talks about
You’re building AI agents. You’ve got the LLM calls working. The demo is impressive.
Then you ship it.
And you discover the real problem was never the model — it was the context.
Which tools should the agent see right now? How do you keep it from calling a GitLab endpoint when the user is asking about a GitHub repo? What happens when you load 200 MCP tools into a single session and the model starts hallucinating capabilities it doesn’t have?
These are the problems nobody talks about at AI conferences. They’re too specific. Too operational. Too boring — until they take down your production system on a Tuesday afternoon.
What this newsletter is
Context Shift is a weekly newsletter for engineers building with MCP and agent infrastructure. Each issue delivers practitioner-tested insights on:
MCP architecture — what the spec says, what it doesn’t, and what actually works
Agent context management — the hard problem of getting the right information to the right model at the right time
The infrastructure layer — the unglamorous plumbing that makes AI systems work in the real world
No hype. No “AI is changing everything” takes. Occasionally I’ll surface something worth reading from elsewhere in the ecosystem, but mostly this is first-hand — the specific, hard-won knowledge that comes from shipping context-aware systems.
Who I am
I’m Craig, founder of sixdegree.ai — a live system intelligence platform that delivers real-time business context to AI agents via MCP. Every week I’m in the code, solving the same problems you’re solving: tool discovery, context windows, entity resolution, agent orchestration.
The things I write about here are things I’ve built, broken, and rebuilt. This newsletter is the one I wish existed when I started.
Subscribe
If you’re building agents, designing MCP servers, or architecting the context layer underneath your AI systems — subscribe. Every issue is written to save you at least one bad production decision.
Let’s get into it.