Ask HN: Minecraft's UI element style (vs. modern flat glass interface)

We wanted to build a course for new Mastra devs to get started quickly. However, we knew videos would go out of date and be more difficult to maintain.

We decided to launch our "course" as an MCP server. This way your coding agent actually teaches the course content to you and can help you write the code. We think this is a really interactive way to learn.

Using an editor with MCP support (such as Cursor, Windsurf, or VSCode), your code agent will call the appropriate MCP tools which will return context for the agent. This context tries to instruct the agent that it should be teaching you the content, not just doing the work for you.

The course is still pretty experimental and some models work better than others. Code is available in the Mastra Github repo in the mcp-docs-server package (https://github.com/mastra-ai/mastra/tree/main/packages/mcp-d...)

Comments (26)

Gorath · 11h ago

This was interesting, but continues to shatter the illusion for me that LLM based programming is vastly superior to someone not using an LLM. It consistently struggled for me to set up what it was trying to do, and had little context in helping me work through issues. I was using windsurf so maybe that was part of my issue? I gave up in part two when it got in a never ending loop trying to connect to the GitHub mcp.

asaiyer · 1h ago

We're going to make some recommendations for which models work best with the course! We've seen some different experiences based on model and IDE.

keeganpoppen · 1d ago

somehow i hadn’t heard of mastra given that i’ve gone out of my way to find and try basically every framework in this vein under the sun, but i gotta say: i’m quite impressed in terms of how clean it is and how well it aligns with i would consider “real” work in this arena… so many of these frameworks try way too hard to be batteries included and/or are otherwise so simple / limited as to feel like they were made by people who don’t actually… “get” it and thus that by extension its users don’t either…

flippyhead · 1d ago

I've been using Mastra for a few months now and we've really been liking it. Team is super responsive and a lot of improvements are afoot.

codekarate · 1d ago

thanks for checking mastra out

if you do find things that need improvement, please let us know in our discord or on x!

hofo · 1d ago

Newbie here: how much of creating agents are portable from one AI platform to another? Do they mostly have the same concepts but differ slightly in implementation? Or something else?

codekarate · 1d ago

The concepts are pretty similar but this course is definitely pretty Mastra specific.

If you are looking for a more general overview on agent development, my co-founder wrote a short book (available free at https://mastra.ai/book)

jsemrau · 1d ago

Most agent frameworks implement a ReAct (Reflect->Act) pattern in the form of a loop that "reasons" until a "final_answer" has been found. Most framworks also implement some form of session cache (scratchpad), tool use, and thought logging/tracing.

While most implementations are similar they are not easily transferable.

djfivyvusn · 1d ago

MCP is portable but isn't very useful for creating agent workflows.

tmaly · 22h ago

This is very cool. I have to figure out a good 7B model to run on LM Studio that can interact with this.

jcmontx · 1d ago

How does the course actually start? I installed it for Cursor. npm run dev. I open a playground and...?

thawab · 22h ago

Start course. It’s an mcp, talk to it like an instructor.

addandsubtract · 6h ago

3. Draw the rest of the fucking owl

This is not enough information for someone new to MCP / agents to start the course. What you actually need to point out, is that users need to type "startMastraCourse" into their IDE's agent mode to actually start the course.

runroader · 3h ago

I'm brand new to MCP and agents but was able to read the extra docs to get VSCode set up with Mastra. Then what? I only figured out the "start Mastra Course" because of their tweet where they show someone typing that into co-pilot.

There really needs to be more hand holding to get someone to the point where the course actually starts. From there I've been able to follow along alright, but it was a real battle to get to this point.

davecyen · 1d ago

This is really cool. I used the OG Codecademy to learn how to code, this is kind of like the next-gen version of that.

codekarate · 1d ago

Thanks!

I definitely remember spending time on Codecademy years ago

justanotheratom · 23h ago

make a video on how to "take" this course

thawab · 22h ago

There are several videos in the link that does this.

addandsubtract · 6h ago

Where?! I only see intro videos to each lesson. No actual "lesson" being shown.

ninkendo · 1d ago

Seeing the title I had the opposite assumption of what it was referring to: I thought of the interface to getting homework, taking tests, submitting assignments, etc as an MCP server and watching an LLM fully pass a course from an online university autonomously. I’m not convinced this isn’t possible today.

avipeltz · 1d ago

yall have been cooking ;) does the course also go through making a workflow or just an agent?

codekarate · 1d ago

it currently only covers creating an agent, adding tools/mcp, and agent memory

later this week we will be releasing a workflows lesson

nilsbunger · 1d ago

While we are talking about workflows, can you show an example of workflow integration with copilotkit?

avipeltz · 1d ago

nice looking forward to it :)

hoppp · 1d ago

The website doesn't look good on mobile

codekarate · 1d ago

thanks, we will get this fixed asap