5 posts tagged with "ChatGPT"

The next shift in AI tools is not only smarter text. It is AI you can see — maps, layouts, and lists that show up inside the conversation when a paragraph is not enough.

MCP Apps (the official extension for interactive UI in MCP hosts) are still early. Iframes feel clunky on some hosts, CSP trips up builders, and Claude and ChatGPT do not behave identically. When it works, though, the conversation changes: you get something you can click, drag, or approve — not just read.

Below are three real screenshots from ChatGPT — Canva, Tripadvisor, and Charge Atlas. No stock art, no protocol demo tiles.

Every Model Context Protocol server on the internet is, at the end of the day, a URL. The hard question is which AI tool you're going to plug it into — and the honest answer is that the experience varies wildly depending on which app you live in.

I run MCPBundles, so I see what users actually do after they generate an MCP URL. A lot of them sign up, get the URL, then bounce because the next step — wiring it into the tool they actually use — is unfamiliar territory. Sometimes that's our fault for not making it obvious. Sometimes the tool's setup flow is genuinely awkward. And sometimes the tool literally hides MCP behind a developer toggle that nobody told you to flip.

This is the field report I'd write a friend who asked me, today, "which AI tool should I use if I want MCP to actually work?" Frank, opinionated, with the quirks named.

MCP Apps look simple in the spec. Your tool returns HTML, the host renders it in an iframe, the user sees a dashboard instead of a wall of JSON. Build one app, it works everywhere.

In practice, I've shipped MCP Apps to both ChatGPT and Claude over the past few months and learned that "works everywhere" requires handling a surprising number of sharp edges — iframe sandboxing, data format differences, a picky initialization handshake, and an interactive tool-calling pattern that's barely documented anywhere.

Here's everything I've learned, with the exact code for each one.

When OpenAI integrated support for Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) into ChatGPT's deep research feature, they documented something elegant: a two-tool pattern that gives AI agents a consistent way to engage with any data source. If your MCP server implements search and fetch with their specific signatures, ChatGPT knows exactly how to explore your data without custom integration code.

Both tools accept only a single string parameter. That constraint isn't a limitation—it's what makes the pattern universal.

OpenAI just made it clear: if you want your MCP server to work with ChatGPT's deep research capabilities, it needs to implement two specific tools: search and fetch.

This isn't optional. It's the protocol standard that enables ChatGPT to discover and retrieve information from external data sources. And if you're using MCPBundles, you already have it.