Going to (or already at) ODSC West? Also, Claude Skills and a Spotify MCP Server

On Thursday afternoon, I'll be giving a workshop on how to give your LLM-based applications superpowers by creating MCP clients for them, allowing you to add tools to your application's repertoire without having to build the tools yourself (unless you want to). I know I love not doing anything, come learn how to level up your applications to true agents with minimal work involved on your part!

From Intelligent to Agentic Applications: Using Model Context Protocol to Support Agentic Behaviors in your Applications

From Intelligent to Agentic Applications:Using Model Context Protocol to Support Agentic Behaviors in your Applications Abstract: Modern AI applications are evolving beyond simple question-answering systems into sophisticated agents capable of interacting with external tools, databases, and services. This hands-on workshop bridges the gap between traditional LLM-powered applications and truly agentic systems by implementing the Model […]

Open Data Science Conference

Claude Skills

Over the weekend, I decided to spend some time with Claude Skills to rapidly vibe code a project that I've been wanting to build for my own use for a couple of years now. I put it through its paces, and you can read about how Skills work and my impressions here.

The project is to create a natural language interface for building music playlists based on similarity or subsets of existing playlists. With a Skill-augmented Claude Code, I was able to put together this MCP server, which connects to Spotify to build playlists and extract audio features and also has a highly modular similarity detection engine, which implements several similarity detection strategies. Now I just have to build the agent interface to consumes the server.

And finally, for all my Greek, Greek-*, and philhellene friends, happy Όχι day!

Όχι (No) Day is a day commemorating the apocryphal story of Ioannis Metaxas, the dictator of Greece, getting an unannounced visit at 3AM on October 28, 1940 by the Italian ambassador to Greece, who gave Metaxas an ultimatum: allow Italy to enter and occupy Greece or face war. The story goes that Metaxas simply replied Όχι ("no"), and Italy invaded 2 hours later. This became a rallying cry of the Greek resistance against the Italians and then the Nazis after the Italians were beaten back, and has been celebrated since 1942. You can read more here.