A Weekend MCP-AQL Adapter for MakerPerks

My friend Nate Aune built MakerPerks, a curated directory of builder perks: free credits, discounts, and programs for startups, students, open source maintainers, and indie developers. There is a lot of real money sitting in those programs that most builders never claim. He talked about it on Sundai, the AI hacker community we are both part of, and I decided to see if I could build him an MCP server super quick. I may have gone a little overboard. It took a weekend, and the adapter is live at makerperks.mcpaql.com, built with MCP-AQL. Any MCP client can point at it and ask real questions: what can a student claim, what can an open source maintainer claim, how much is it worth, and where do you redeem it. ...

July 2, 2026 · 3 min · Mick Darling

About

I like building things. Usually tools that solve problems I keep running into. What I’m Working On Now Dollhouse Research Dollhouse Research is where the rest of this now sits. The through line is building blocks for AI customization: making expertise, process, memory, and tools reusable, open, and easy to combine, instead of something every team rebuilds from scratch in prompts. The research side of it is about whether the claims hold up. It is easy to say an architecture makes agents more reliable. It is harder to run the experiment, register what you expected beforehand, and publish the number you actually got. That is the part I care about, and it is why there is a lab rather than just a product. ...

7 min · Mick Darling