I thought the hard part was shipping the MCP server.

It was not.

The hard part started after the server was public, listed, installable, and testable outside my own machine.

FreshContext is my MCP project around freshness-aware retrieval. The basic idea is simple: agents should not treat stale information as current truth. Every retrieved signal gets wrapped with source, timestamp, retrieval time, and confidence metadata, then ranked with freshness decay before it reaches the model.

That was the first public story.

But once the site, npm package, MCP Registry entry, Agentic Market listing, and feed APIs were live, a different kind of work became more important:

Making the system fail honestly.

The bug that bothered me most

A read-only QA pass found several issues.

Some were normal integration problems:

one finance path was failing against Yahoo with a 401

the Hacker News tool rejected plain text even though the product copy implied search-like behavior

one HN scrape path produced a malformed…