Connect an AI agent to your API and dozens of tools pile into its context before the agent has done anything at all. There are better ways, each with its own trade-offs.

After a refresher on the Model Context Protocol and its PHP SDK, covering how an agent discovers your tools, understands what they expect and calls them, we'll look at feeding an agent its tools from Symfony and API Platform. The automatic strategies first: generating tools directly from your API, or a Hydra gateway that lets the agent discover them by following hypermedia links. Then the manual approach, declaring exactly the tools you want with PHP attributes.

We'll build them live and weigh them honestly: what saturates the context, what scales, what respects the constraints of REST and HATEOAS. You'll leave knowing which approach fits your own APIs.