Building a Shared Operational Substrate with MCP Servers
Stop duplicating service clients across your agent workforce. Learn how VERA uses MCP servers to expose studio financials and approvals to every agent through a single protocol.
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The shift in how we build digital products isn't just about better large language models. It is about the plumbing. AI has collapsed the cost of building software, but it has not yet collapsed the cost of coordination. When you run a digital product studio as a single operator, your biggest bottleneck isn't writing code—it is the overhead of managing the agents that write the code.
I learned the hard way that duplicating service clients and operational logic across a fleet of agents is a recipe for drift. If your research agent, your deployment agent, and your finance agent all have their own bespoke ways of checking a project’s status or verifying a budget, you aren't running a studio; you are managing a chaotic group of interns. To solve this, I built VERA. Originally a set of internal scripts, VERA has evolved into the operational heart of Total Ventures. By exposing VERA as an MCP server, I have created a shared operational substrate that allows every agent in the workspace to access studio vitals through a single, unified protocol.
The Fragmentation of Agentic Engineering
In the early days of building Total Ventures, I treated every agent as a silo. I would give a coding agent access to a specific repository and a research agent access to a search tool. This worked for simple tasks, but it failed the moment I needed the agents to understand the context of the business.
If a coding agent is tasked with refactoring a module, it needs to know if that module is part of a product we are actively scaling or one we are simply maintaining. If a content agent is drafting a newsletter, it needs to know the latest shipped artifacts from the monorepo. Without a shared source of truth, I was spending more time syncing context than I was making decisions.
This is where the Model Context Protocol (MCP) changes the game. Instead of building custom integrations for every new agent, I can build one server that exposes the entire studio’s state. This is the core of agentic engineering: building the systems that allow the machine to work without constant human intervention.
VERA: The Studio’s Operational Substrate
VERA stands as the bridge between my high-level intent and the machine’s execution. It is not just a database; it is a set of capabilities. When VERA is running as one of our mcp-servers, any agent I interact with—whether it is through Claude Code or a custom orchestration layer—can call upon it to understand the studio’s health.
This architecture moves the complexity out of the agent’s prompt and into the infrastructure. You no longer have to explain to an agent how to check Stripe for a customer’s subscription status or how to look up the current runway in the P&L. You simply give the agent the tool to ask VERA.
Studio Notes
How I’m building the studio.
The operator’s log — systems, decisions, and what’s working.
Written by
Founder, Total Ventures
Solo-founder building a multi-brand product studio with AI agents. Writing about building, operating, and shipping.
