A software engineer shares a practical workaround for a common MCP (Model Context Protocol) server onboarding problem: users opening the MCP endpoint URL in a browser see a raw 401 JSON error and file support tickets thinking the service is broken. The fix is simple — detect browser requests via the Accept header and return a human-readable HTML page explaining how to add the server to an MCP client instead. This reduced support tickets significantly without any negative side effects. The post also critiques the MCP spec for lacking guidance on this kind of user-facing friction.
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