Growing up as an integration engineer, I built my career religiously reading the Enterprise Integration Patterns book from Gregor Hohpe. Content-Based Router, Dead Letter Channel, Claim Check these weren't just patterns, they were how I thought about systems. That book shaped an entire generation of us who built middleware, ESBs, and messaging infrastructure.
Two decades later, I found myself staring at a eerily familiar set of problems but with a completely different consumer. Not applications. Not services. AI agents.
It's been an exciting and one-of-its-kind experience working with the Arcade tool engineering team to extract implementation patterns from 7,000+ production tools. Especially Evan Tahler Renato Byrro & Francisco Liberal
54 patterns across 10 categories, so everyone building tools and MCP servers can ship higher quality tools for their agents.
A couple things that make this practical:
Every pattern downloads as a flash card. Drop them into your architecture decks, design reviews, team workshops.
Every pattern exports as markdown / llms.txt for your IDE.
The workflow: point your coding agent at one or more patterns and say "build an MCP server for this API."
The pattern becomes your implementation spec.
Blog: https://blog.arcade.dev/mcp-tool-patterns
Full catalog: https://arcade.dev/patterns