Building real-time features fast with the PubNub MCP: Eric Lake
Eric Lake is a Senior Solutions Architect at PubNub, where he sits between engineering and sales, helping customers add real-time features to their applications. He learns by building, and since installing PubNub's MCP server in his first week on the job three months ago, that build cycle has gotten dramatically faster. We sat down with Eric to learn how he uses the MCP server to rapidly demo PubNub functionality.
How fast can you actually go from an idea to a working real-time feature with the MCP?
My favorite demo right now uses Illuminate (a real-time decisioning platform) to watch chat during a livestream. If someone chats a few times in a five-minute window, Illuminate ingests those messages and fires a webhook that grants them access to a VIP room. Conversely, If AI moderation catches someone repeating naughty phrases, it can revoke their token instead. It's a simple idea that's typically difficult to implement.
With the MCP and the PubNub platform, I built the actual functionality in about an hour. Of course, then I spent way too long making it look how I wanted it to look (I particularly like front-end development) but the hard part, the part that would normally take real engineering time, was done almost immediately.
Do you need to already understand PubNub's best practices to get a good result?
Not really, no. If I see that PubNub can do something like threaded chat, I could sit and think about the best way to implement it for a couple minutes. But the MCP already knows the most efficient way to do it. It has access to all our documentation and best practices, so I don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Here are some examples of demos built with the PubNub MCP server:
What makes Pubnub's MCP different from the other MCP servers you've used?
Pubnub's is one of the best-implemented MCP servers I've used. It's token-efficient. A lot of MCP servers just expose a billion tools and fill up three-quarters of your context window before you've done anything. Pubnub's isn't like that.
Also, it's different from tools that hand you pre-built components you can't restyle or customize. The Pubnub MCP knows the best practices to hit a huge range of use cases, but it lets me lead. It enforces good practice instead of prescribing one rigid way to do it.
I've used a ton of MCP servers, and I think some engineers collect skill files and MCP servers hoping the collection itself will give them taste. To use an analogy, it's the same as producing music. Some producers do nothing but collect plugins and samples and hope that stands in for actually having a vision of what they want to make. A pile of tools doesn't build the thing. Knowing what you're trying to build does, and the PubNub MCP is useful once you already know that.
Beyond writing code, this MCP server also helps with configuration. I don't need to go handwrite my Illuminate business objects anymore. I can just tell the agent to use the Pubnub MCP to set those up and configure the decisions, and that's the part that makes building truly pleasant.
Can looking at what the MCP built actually teach you the tech?
When you pop open new documentation for a service you've never used, it can be intimidating. You might think "Do I need a tutorial just to understand this?" With the MCP, once I describe what I want to achieve, it handles the implementation following best practice, and the value comes in going over the code or configuration, and seeing what it did.
This way I can learn. I want to personally understand what's happening, not just trust that it worked.
It's like learning math in school: you read through worked examples first, then do a similar problem using the pattern you just saw. The MCP gets me a working version of what I'm trying to do, and I use that working version to understand it more deeply than I would reading docs cold.
Why is the moderation demo more than a neat trick?
Moderating language is hard in general: it's hard to understand the intent of a message. Someone might say something off-color once in a chat, and that's fine; they're still a valuable part of the community. But repeat trolls ruin the experience for everyone else, and having PubNub AI Moderation ban a repeat offender is genuinely useful, not a narrow one-person use case.
It's also relatively simple to implement using pieces of the platform off the shelf. I demoed it to a customer last week, and it's easy to imagine it being useful to a lot of our customers.
What would you tell someone who hasn't picked up the MCP yet?
Some MCP servers you just install in your coding agent and hope they help with everyday tasks in the background. That's not how I'd use the Pubnub MCP. If you have an idea for making an application more engaging through a real-time experience, use it surgically to get that one thing done.
It doesn't even have to be implementation: I like chatting with the MCP about a rough idea before I build anything, just to galvanize it, as it's trained on all our docs and SDKs. Turn it on when you want to prototype or ship a real-time experience, and turn it off when you don't. It doesn't need to add to your everyday tool bloat.
Check out the PubNub MCP server.
Eric Lake, Senior Solutions Architect at PubNub.
