You Don’t Need to Know Anything Anymore

I recently used Codex to build an MCP server for Genie, an Oracle APEX application I use to manage projects and tasks. It lets me work with Genie through clients such as Codex and Claude.

I can ask Codex to triage tickets from somebody else’s descriptions and screenshots, make bulk updates, and hand the triaged tickets to a coding agent—all without necessarily opening Genie.

This involves infrastructure, authentication, application security, and integration. The OCI setup includes:

• 1 MCP server and 11 tools
• 1 Database Tools connection
• 2 identity applications (MCP resource and OAuth client), with 3 application roles
• 1 user group and 2 IAM policies
• 1 vault, 1 encryption key, and 2 secrets

Doing this manually would have taken ages (a technical term), including learning enough about OCI's MCP service to get started.

Codex, using the OCI CLI, handled that implementation work for me. Once the credentials were in place, I could describe what I wanted and have it built without working through the OCI Console setup screens.

I did not need to become an expert in every technology involved before I could use it. I needed to know what good looked like.

Of course, there is quite a lot hiding in that sentence.

I know Genie. I understand enough about OCI, security, and application development to assess what was built. I could check that it did what I wanted and recognize when something needed correcting. That knowledge gave me a basis for trusting the result.

I think this is where AI makes experience especially useful. We can apply our understanding to a much wider range of work, with far less time spent learning the mechanics of each implementation.

Knowing what good looks like is still knowledge. It may become some of the most valuable knowledge we have.