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Making agents or adding existing agents to Coral is easy, but there are some important considerations when using LLMs for coding tasks.

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Tl;dr

Use DeepWiki and Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1

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MCP is new

Coral agents connect to their coral servers via MCP (Model Context Protocol). MCP is a protocol for exposing tools and other context-related primitives to LLMs via convenient transports like HTTP. MCP was announced in November 2024, as a consequence it is outside the training window of many LLMs (expect a 1-2 year lag in general). As a consequence, stating that the coral server provides an MCP interface for agents means much more to a human than to an LLM. Coral itself is also too new to be in the training window of many LLMs, so stating that an agent is “Coralized” or “built with Coral” also will not be understood by many LLMs. Unfortunately, many LLMs will hallucinate that they understand MCP and Coral, and will produce code that is syntactically correct but semantically incorrect.

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Table of models and their awareness of MCP and Coral

ModelMCP AwarenessCoral AwarenessNotes
Sonnet 4.5YesNo
Opus 4.1YesNoSeems less familiar than Sonnet 4.5
Gemini 2.5 ProNoNoTraining cut-off after MCP and Coral release
GPT-4NoNoTraining cut-off before MCP and Coral release
Llama 3NoNoTraining cut-off before MCP and Coral release
Mistral 7BNoNoTraining cut-off before MCP and Coral release
You could give a lengthy explanation of MCP to an LLM, but we recommend using a model that is aware of MCP natively. Even if a model is aware of MCP, it likely will not be aware of its latest features or niche features, so still exercise caution.

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DeepWiki

DeepWiki provides an LLM-generated documentation of the coral server’s code. It is generally pretty accurate. It can be asked questions directly, or be used as a source of truth for other agents.

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Prompt engineering

When using LLMs for coding tasks, prompt engineering is crucial. Here are some tips:
  • Encourage the model to ask questions to you about Coral and MCP if it is unsure.
  • Work from high quality up to date examples.
  • For agentic coding tools without access to DeepWiki, consider giving them access to the coral server source

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Warnings

Vibe coding can engage less familiar developers and allow people to get started faster, but it is not a substitute for understanding the underlying technology and your solution. Typing is rarely the bottleneck in software development. Agentic coding tool usage is inherently tech debt producing. It is easy to fall into a trap where you have a solution that seems to work, but you don’t understand how it works or how to fix it when it breaks. Consider using a tool like Copilot or Windsurf to assist with typing and help to explore unfamiliar APIs and languages without delegating thinking itself to something that cannot learn.
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