I’m working on a (small) open source application where I’m currently the only contributor. I setup the project so that the main branch is protected by a branch protection rule. By using branch protection rules, you can enforce certain workflows or requirements before someone can push changes to a branch, including merging a pull request into the branch. You can view the active branch protection rules by going to Settings –> Branches (available in the Code and automation section): In my case I had setup a rule that required a pull request before merging son that I could track and iterate on changes in separate branches. To see the specific branch rule, click on Edit next to the branch: I liked the pull request model for this application but as a default GitHub also configured that an approval was required by at least one reviewer. This is great if you are working with multiple contributors on a project but as I was working mostly alone on it, requiring such a review n...
As the list of available tools keeps growing, sooner or later something will not work and some debugging becomes necessary. In this post I look into ways to troubleshoot your MCP integration. Let's dive in! To understand what we need to debug you need to be aware of the architecture of an MCP integration. It follows a client-server architecture , where AI models can request data through a host with an MCP client (e.g. GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, …) from MCP servers, which then retrieve relevant information from local or remote sources. This means that when a problem occurs that there (at least) 2 places to look at. Debugging the MCP client Let’s start by looking into the client. The way you need to debug the client is completely dependent on the host. I’ll focus on GitHub Copilot and Claude Desktop. GitHub Copilot When VSCode encounters an error while trying to interact with an MCP server, you get a red error indicator in the Chat window: Click on the icon and...