There's a huge paradigm shift happening across the industry because of AI.
More and more users are using chatbots nowadays for their routine searches or research,
and that's why the concept of MCP apps is getting more and more popular. Instead of spitting out a JSON file or a markdown document, more apps and services are switching to providing these interactive and helpful widgets inside a chatbot. And the company Alpic recently released a cool new framework called SkyBridge
that makes it super easy to create your own custom MCP apps for all sorts of different use cases. So in today's video, we'll take a look at SkyBridge, see how it works, and try it out for ourselves. It's gonna be a lot of fun, so let's dive into it.
To really understand why SkyBridge is such a big deal, you have to understand how these new apps work. When you build a traditional web app, you are building it for one user, the human. But with an MCP app, you're actually building for two users at once, the human and the AI assistant because they both share the exact same interface.
The human can click buttons, type inputs, and slide sliders, and the LLM instantly sees that state. And conversely, the LLM can update the data in the background and the UI changes in real time right in front of you. And SkyBridge is an open source TypeScript framework for that that handles all the complex plumbing, the protocol bridging, the state sync, and the security rules, so you can just focus on writing standard React code. Now if you've ever tried to build MCP apps for chat GPT or Claude before,
you know that the local testing loop used to be a massive headache. You had to manually set up public tunnels, copy paste configurations
and restart your chat sessions just to fix a tiny CSS typo.
But the coolest part of SkyBridge one point zero is that it completely redesigned
the dev tools control panel. Now when you run your local dev server, it fires up an emulator dashboard in your browser. And inside this dashboard, you have three nice tools.
The first one is the Alpic playground,
a local sandbox where you can test your tools and and tweak your React widgets using live hot module replacement. And you can see the changes instantly without touching an actual LLM yet. And secondly, there's an integrated tunnel which allows you with literally a single click to expose your local server through a secure public URL.
So you don't have to mess around with external tunneling anymore. Just paste this URL into ChatGPT's
developer settings and you're live. And third is the beacon audit tool. And this is a lifesaver if you plan to submit your apps to public stores. It scans your apps metadata tools and security policies to catch common rejection triggers before you submit your app for review.
And the coolest thing is that even if you've never built an MCP app, you can easily install the SkyBridge skill onto your favorite AI agent to get started instantly.
So now let's try to build a small MCP app on our own and see how it works.
So for this demo, I've went ahead and created this little ecommerce website
where you can shop for different camera lenses,
and it's basically a fully built React based store with a cart and checkout functionality.
And now I want to add an MCP app for it so that if a potential customer uses a chatbot like ChatGPT
or Claude to search for camera lens recommendations,
it will immediately call our MCP app to show our product listings for the end user.
So as I said before, the easiest way to get started is just to install the SkyBridge skill and we can install it globally or just for our specific repo.
And for this demo purpose, I'm going to go ahead and install it in the repo.
And now you can see we have this dot agents directory with the SkyBridge skill present.
And all I have to do now is just ask Claude to build me an MCP app for my ecommerce shop.
And before building it, Claude will first ask me some follow-up questions about the intent of the app to better understand what kind of functionality we need to include in it. And for this demo, I want to have an app that lists lenses based on what the user is looking for, and then we can select them and compare them side by side and also add them to our cart and provide a quick checkout solution for our customers.
And that's basically all I need to do and now I just let Claude do its thing.
And in about a few minutes, see that Claude has generated our MCP app. And the coolest part is that now we can open the developer dashboard provided by SkyBridge
and try it out for ourselves.
So now if we open the dashboard, we can see how it looks. And here we have our search lenses tool and the place order tool.
So first of all, for search lenses, I'm just gonna insert
the max price for the lenses I'm looking for and let's limit it to five lenses maybe.
And there you go. It found
14 matches that are under
$2,000.
Here's how the app looks on desktop. We can also preview the mobile view.
Looks good. We also have a dark mode and a light mode.
And here we have the tool output and the state.
And watch what happens if I select some of the lenses.
As you can see, the state updates on the fly, which is super cool. So now let's let's choose three lenses.
And now if we click compare,
we now get to the compare screen and here we can see
all our three lenses side by side with all the parameters.
And if we're happy with this selection, we can also go to the checkout.
And this moves to the checkout stage
where we can
put in our full name, email, and shipping address and place our order. So as you can see, this dashboard is really cool for testing out your widgets
to see if everything is working as expected.
And now if we go to Claude
and in settings, we have this section called connectors,
and we have to click customize.
And for this, you will need the tunnel URL, so make sure you have activated the tunnel. And we can just copy this URL.
And in the connector section,
you just have to add a custom connector,
give a name,
and paste in that
tunnel URL
and just click add. I've already added it here.
And last thing you need to do is click connect,
and you can also set the permissions if you want these tools to run automatically
or you want an approval from the user.
And then we can just go ahead and start a new chat.
And in the new chat, I can now ask, give me some recommendations for the best lenses under $2,000
for portrait shooting.
And we can now see that it says it will search the lens shop catalog for some great portrait options under $2,000.
And look at that. It it opened our MCP app. How cool is that? And we can do the same things over here.
We can select some of the lenses over here
and then go to the compare section
and it has this little
comparison table.
The only thing I noticed is that we have this
white space
from the previous state of our tool. So this is probably something you can fix in CSS.
But everything is looking great
and we also have the option to checkout
and we get to the checkout section where we can place our order.
So how cool is this?
And lastly and most importantly,
to see if your app is ready to be published to the public app stores, we can also run an audit of our app through the developer dashboard and check if we have any issues with it. And, basically, that's it. In just a few minutes, we were able to build a production ready MCP app with SkyBridge
that we could theoretically submit to the AI app store.
So I hope this shows you how easy it is to get up and running with SkyBridge,
and, honestly, it feels like the future of the modern web. I think we will start seeing more and more of these interactive MCP widget apps inside our chatbots. So it's nice that there are frameworks like SkyBridge out there that are making the process of creating these kinds of apps so much easier for us developers.
So there you have it folks. That is SkyBridge in a nutshell. So what do you think about SkyBridge? Have you tried it? Will you use it? Let us know in the comment section down below.
And folks, if you like these types of technical breakdowns, please let me know by smashing that like button underneath the video,
and also don't forget to subscribe to our channel. This has been Andres from BetterStack and I will see you in the next videos.