6 guides · concepts, building, shipping

The things worth knowing before you wire anything up.

Reference documentation tells you what the parameters are. These tell you which decision you are actually making, why the obvious approach costs more than it should, and what to do when the first result is not the one you wanted.

Start here

The concepts everything else assumes.

What is MCP?

6 min

The Model Context Protocol explained without the marketing: client, server, transport, and the three primitives a server can expose.

MCP vs REST API

5 min

One question decides it — who chooses what to call, the model or your code? Everything else follows.

Building

Turning capability into a pipeline that behaves.

Add image generation to an AI agent

9 min

Six decisions, a worked pipeline that never holds bytes in memory, and the five mistakes that cost real money.

AI image prompting

7 min

The six components of a prompt that works, why one reference image beats a paragraph of adjectives, and fixes for the five common failures.

Shipping

The decisions that happen after the image exists.

WebP vs AVIF vs PNG vs JPEG

6 min

Two questions settle almost every case. Plus why SVG is not on the same list and cannot be converted into.

Bring your own OpenRouter key

5 min

What BYOK changes, what it does not, how the key is stored, and the two situations where switching is actually worth it.

Looking for something more specific?

Tools

What each of the eight image operations does.

Integrations

Setup for seven MCP clients.

Use cases

Complete workflows with credit costs.

API reference

Every endpoint, parameter and response.