Development on Latacora

Writing MCP servers in Clojure with Ring and Malli

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 10:00:00 -0500

Introduction

Large language models, agents, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) are impossible to escape in today’s tech climate. At Latacora, we take a thoughtful and pragmatic approach towards new technologies like these. Are they going to solve all the world’s problems? No. Is it important that we understand them and be able to build software that integrates into emerging ecosystems? Yes!

Internally we’ve built a MCP server to query our Datomic databases using natural language, but now we’re open sourcing the underlying Clojure library so others can easily build robust MCP servers for the emerging LLM agent ecosystem too.

Loud subshells

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 12:21:00 -0400

Default shells usually end in $. Unless you’re root and it’s #. That tradition has been around forever: people recognized the need to highlight you’re not just some random shmoe.

These days we have lots of snazzy shell magic. You might still su, but you’re more likely to sudo. We still temporarily assume extra privileges. If you have access to more than one set of systems, like production and staging, you probably have ways of putting on a particular hat. Some combination of setting an environment variable, adding a key to ssh-agent, or assuming an AWS role with aws-vault. You know, so you don’t accidentally blow away prod.

Cryptographic right answers

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 15:25:00 -0400

We’re less interested in empowering developers and a lot more pessimistic about the prospects of getting this stuff right.

There are, in the literature and in the most sophisticated modern systems, “better” answers for many of these items. If you’re building for low-footprint embedded systems, you can use STROBE and a sound, modern, authenticated encryption stack entirely out of a single SHA-3-like sponge constructions. You can use NOISE to build a secure transport protocol with its own AKE. Speaking of AKEs, there are, like, 30 different password AKEs you could choose from.

Development on Latacora

Writing MCP servers in Clojure with Ring and Malli

Introduction #

Loud subshells

Cryptographic right answers

Introduction