The Flow Studio MCP Journey Ahead

I have been thinking about a few things at once.

Agents are better, MCP is better, but customers still need business processes that run tomorrow.

Improving an MCP is a journey

An MCP is not an API wrapper. It is a bridge: clearer tools, smaller operations, safer edits, better errors, less wasted context. The answer is not simply “use CLI because it has less context”.

Older LLMS are worse at writing code; But the latest LLMs are bad at figuring out which tools to use - simply because they guess and don’t remember the tool_list. 4.7 spins around in circles when something 4.5 and 4.6 did fine.

This probably means two things for us: implement tool search, and reducing unnecessary tools. You can bet we’ll write again about why tool search is way better than CLI —help

We wrote more about this in Building the best bridge between your Agent and Power Automate.

Why still build Power Automate? Why not just use agents and skills.

Agents reason. Power Automate repeats. The agent can design, debug, explain, and improve the flow, but the flow is still the durable process. Flows are deterministic. They don’t wake up one day and say a different thing, or tell you they are out of tokens and only works 3 weeks out of 4.

What is a skill? When does an agent choose a skill?

A skill is local wisdom for an agent: rules, examples, files, patterns, and helper scripts. It is all the context your agent has learned about how to do something, remembered, so it can do it again.

A good skill is specific enough to be chosen at the right time. A vague skill becomes noise.

Let the agent leave context behind, particularly scripts

Give agents a folder for notes, examples, decisions, docs, and scripts. Memory is fuzzy; files are inspectable, code tells agents far more than words - it tells agents how to do it and how it did it before.

Do not just write skills markdown files. The industry direction is saying that this is becoming an anti-pattern. Text is up to intepretations. Write deterministic code: scripts for repeated steps, checkers for rules, tools for reliable workflows. All the work on extending agent interface with systems is via MCP and MCP-sdk (which shows strong type safe ways to interface).

Talking to real customers

We are doing alot more marketing for Flow Studio MCP (and in general, to create discussions of using MCP for Power Automate - this timed well with Microsoft releasing MCP for Power Apps). But marketing can feel like shouting into a vacuum. It’s always the actual talking to customers that gives us the right signals to move forward. When we see customers delighted and telling us what they are doing with the MCP. Or even complain to us about what it’s not doing.

Finding time to learn

We recently went to visit some good friends in Sydney who are doing a lot of M365, Power Automate, and decided to just do a show and tell, turned into a bit of a training lunch session. The feedback and enthusiasm was wonderful. We’re wondering how to do more of this. Ask us to come and do a lunch time demo at your work!

Having fun

We are having so much fun doing what we do.

Agents amplify the work we are able to do

Which means we are able to not only continue improving MCP, but also add so much more work to Flow Studio App. We’ve done massive clean up (the code was originally created in 2018), moving forward to Azure SWA. Creating suites of tests. Much much better performance management (we even implemented a whole browser-based SQLite backend for all the caching - you’ll really feel the impact of this). It also means we can move forward so much more and add more tools.

People building startups told me for the last decade - John don’t build 100 tools, you can’t manage that or market that. Actually, I think with agents, it’s better to build lots of tools. If I only have one tool - any agent could replace me over a weekend right?

More physical monitors, more screens

I’m honest, when an Agent starting doing a work, you switch away and do something else. So you need more monitors now. Buy monitors.

There’s a strong discussion right now about what the “AI Harness” looks like, currently it’s VS Code with extensions, but that’s really because we tagged on Agents to our existing development process. The future may look different - and there’s a lot of different directions people are trying: virtual workspaces, new terminals, CLI, desktop etc.

Anyway, I think we’ll all need more screens.

The Journey Ahead

This is a post of many things, I’m not sure how to land it.

I guess, the one thing I really want to call out is we would love to come to talk to you about MCP for Power Automate. Lunch, in person? Virtual? User group? Record a video? let us know.