Need MCP Documentation to Provide Operational Context
Developers need to understand how an API behaves in production, but most documentation remains reference-only.
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Persona Story:
Noah, the head of integration, needs developers to understand how an API behaves in production, but most documentation remains reference-only.
Problem Context
- Industry is improving machine-accessible documentation and reference material
- The hard problem is not “can we retrieve docs?” but “how do we encode operationally-relevant context?”
- Multiple approaches exist, but there is no clear best practice
Problem Impact
- Teams ship brittle integrations because documentation doesn’t highlight operational realities
- Reliability and incident response suffer due to missing context
- Platform and integration teams spend cycles answering questions documentation should have preempted
Naftiko Today
- YAML capability specs encode operational context (auth requirements, data mappings, multi-step orchestration) as executable, machine-readable documentation
- OutputParameters with JSONPath, field renaming, and array handling document the actual shape of data returned in production
- Multi-step orchestration with cross-step data mapping captures operational workflows that reference docs typically omit
- Lookup/JOIN operations document server-side enrichment patterns, making data dependencies explicit rather than tribal knowledge
Naftiko Tomorrow
- Tool annotations for readOnly/destructive/idempotent (Second Alpha) would encode operational safety context directly in the capability metadata
- HTTP cache control (Second Alpha) would document and enforce caching behavior as part of the capability spec
- TechDocs integration (Fleet First Beta) would publish operational context from capability specs directly into Backstage documentation
- Mock mode (Second Alpha) would let teams validate operational behavior documented in specs before hitting production APIs