Looking for richer real-world use cases & patterns for MCP resources

[MadanMaram]

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Question Category

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Usage
• Server Implementation
• General Implementation
• Documentation
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Your Question

Hi everyone,

I have a working demo MCP server (using FastMCP) where I expose a greeting resource and a simple add(a, b) tool. In Claude Desktop, asking “2 + 3” triggers the tool call and returns the computed sum. But I feel I’m not fully leveraging the resources side of MCP — it seems too trivial.

What I’m seeking:

Realistic, non-toy use cases where resources (read-only data) play an essential, non-trivial role (beyond greeting or static values).

Patterns or architecture suggestions for combining resources + tools so resources offer real value (e.g. document retrieval, configuration, logs, snapshots).

Code examples or reference MCP projects showing rich resource templates (e.g. doc://{id}, metrics://{service}, user://{id} with deeper context).

Advice / pitfalls: when resources are overused, or when things that should be tools are mistakenly implemented as resources.

My current understanding / constraints:

Resources are read-only, no side-effects.

Resources must be deterministic in the same context.

Tools are used when actions, updates, or logic must run.

Could someone share some sample MCP server code or architectural ideas showing resource + tool coordination in a real workflow (e.g. document QA, internal app agents, config + logs, database snapshots)?

[yannj-fr]

Just have a look to MCP-UI and OpenAI sdk, resources are used to convert html to render with a tool