The Powerduck Blog
Product updates, engineering notes, and guides for designing, debugging, testing, mocking, and serving MCP tools from one OpenAPI spec.
Browse the guidesQuick answer: When a browser frontend talks to a local Mockoon server, the two things that break first are TLS and CORS, and they are separate problems. Enable HTTPS in
Read articleQuick answer: A Redocly decorator is a plugin that transforms an OpenAPI document during the bundle step, adding, removing, or rewriting content before it is published. That power is useful
Read articleQuick answer: MDX components make docs interactive and expressive, but they are custom code that only builds inside the component ecosystem that defines them, which is a real portability cost.
Read articleQuick answer: Insomnia resolves a variable name by searching scopes in a defined order, and the narrowest scope wins. When the same name appears in a request, an environment, and
Read articleQuick answer: CLI and GUI parity means the same collection, environment, and assertions produce the same result on a laptop and in CI, which only happens when the GUI is
Read articleQuick answer: In a hosted MCP deployment, secrets belong in the platform's environment variable store or a dedicated secret manager, never in the tool configuration, the JSON the
Read articleQuick answer: When two MCP servers expose a tool with the same name, an agent cannot reliably tell them apart by name alone, and it may call the wrong backend.
Read articleQuick answer: Postman environments and globals are just scoped key-value stores, and they migrate cleanly into plain files when you separate configuration from secrets. Move non-sensitive values into environment files
Read articleQuick answer: HEAD and OPTIONS are metadata methods, and the contract should state what they guarantee rather than leaving them implicit. A HEAD request must return the same headers as
Read articleQuick answer: OpenAPI format hints such as uuid, email, uri, and date-time are annotations, not enforced types, and most generators emit a plain string for them unless you configure a
Read articleQuick answer: Elicitation lets an MCP server ask the client to collect a missing value from the user mid-call, instead of immediately failing or guessing. Use it when the tool
Read articleQuick answer: If the API does not guarantee an order, your test should not assert one. Comparing a returned array element-by-element against a fixed sequence makes the test fail whenever
Read article