Step-by-step guide showing how an MCP client discovers messaging capabilities, plans execution, sends an SMS and tracks delivery using the official MCP Inspector.
one thing that always felt off to me is how much focus goes into how access is granted and rotated, and much less into what actually happens after that access is used
even with short-lived or well-scoped credentials, the behavior behind them can still be pretty opaque depending on the system
so you reduce risk on access, but what happens after can still be hard to reason about or observe
200 is correct at the protocol level, no argument there.
I think where it gets confusing is that people treat it as “done”, while in a lot of real systems it just means the request got accepted and handed off.
after that it’s queues, providers, retries, all kinds of stuff you don’t really see.
so you end up with “success” at the API layer but still inconsistent outcomes.
that’s mostly what I’ve been running into in production.
This came from debugging a few production cases where everything looked fine at the API level, but delivery still varied depending on downstream handling.
Probably should’ve made that less abstract and more concrete.