Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? There's documentation on how to set things up to be able to get the documentation? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor.

Want it to be easy to update? Make it a git repo with all the docs. My agent already knows to always do a git fetch before interacting with a repo in a new session. Or you can fetch on a timer. Whatever.

I haven't yet figured out the point of this MCP stuff. Codex seems to have innate knowledge of how to curl jira and confluence and gitlab and prometheus and SQL databases and more. All you need to configure is a .netrc file and put the hostname in AGENTS.md. Are MCP tools even composable? Like can the model pipe the response to grep or jq or another MCP call without it entering/wasting context? Or is a normal CRUD API strictly more powerful and easier to use?

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#5

Post by inshard » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:13 AM UTC

I can relate to this. Gemini 3 doesn’t know a thing about iOS 26 or Liquid Glass. It constantly assumes this is some custom view that I want it to develop and ends up building something out the previous gen apis like ultrathinmaterial.

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#6

Post by latchkey » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #4

Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? There's documentation on how to set things up to be able to get the documentation? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor. Want it to be easy to…

> Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated?

Job security.

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#7

Post by nlawalker » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 5:53 AM UTC

Esophagus4 wrote: post #3

AWS has theirs as well: https://awslabs.github.io/mcp/servers/aws-documentation-mcp-... As it turns out these are very helpful for obscure features and settings buried in the documentation.

Microsoft too:

https://learn.microsoft.com/training/support/mcp

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/mcp

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/microsoft-learn-mcp-se...

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#8

Post by superturkey650 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:08 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #4

Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? There's documentation on how to set things up to be able to get the documentation? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor. Want it to be easy to…

How do you manage auth for services that use OAuth?

I’ve been wrapping the agent’s curl calls in a small cli that handles the auth but I’m wondering if other people have come up with something lighter/more portable.

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#9

Post by lemonish97 » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:08 AM UTC

So an mcp server just for google specific public docs? Aren't there a dozen of them like Context7 (https://context7.com/) that already do this?

Re: Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

#10

Post by utopiah » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 6:26 AM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #4

Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? There's documentation on how to set things up to be able to get the documentation? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor. Want it to be easy to…

> Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB?

  fabien@debian2080ti:~$ du -sh /usr/share/man/ #all lang
  52M     /usr/share/man/

Yep... in fact there are already a lot of tooling for that, e.g. man obviously but also apropos.