Building a radar with live data

1. Building the radar with live data

Alex had just been walking him through it — showing by example how the mcp cable draws in the tremors, how the AI crawls onto someone else’s site for the style all by itself. That was master work. And now Tommy is building the radar cleanly and on his own — with Sam, from an empty folder to a finished page. He has everything he needs in hand: the form with the fields DATA_REQUEST, the DATA_SCHEMA-lite diagram, how the fields will turn into dots, and the understanding that the radar will go fetch data on its own through the mcp cable. Only a little is left — put it all together.

First, Tommy hands Sam the page itself. Not “make a radar,” but in plain human terms, just like Alex taught him: you need a dark world map full-screen, empty underneath, with dots appearing from the top. Sam spits out the scaffold: black background, outlines of the continents, still without a single dot. The draft is there — now pour life into it.

First things first — the cable to the data. The very quakes, without a key. Tommy connects it with a single command in the terminal, just like Alex taught him yesterday:

claude mcp add --transport http quakes <address-of-the-open-data-MCP-server>
claude mcp list          # quakes → ✓ Connected

Okay, the cable is in place. Now Tommy dictates the task to Sam — in plain words, but that is, basically, yesterday’s two forms spoken out loud:

“Sam, use quakes to pull the latest tremors. From each one — mag, coordinates, time. Magnitude → point size, freshness → brightness, coordinates → where to place it. If the service stays silent — keep the last picture, don’t blank the screen.”

He recognizes his own DATA_REQUEST (what to take) and DATA_SCHEMA-lite (how to use it) — only now not on paper, but out loud, as a working task. Sam gets to work.

And almost immediately he pings Tommy with a short request:

“Will you allow access to the external resource?”

“Just look at that, everything has to be done by myself. You can’t take a single step without me. Of course I allow it. Do whatever you want,” Tommy muttered and clicked “allow.” “Just get on with it, basically.”

Sam finishes the last lines and connects to the mcp cable. Tommy opens the site.

The map blinked.

A second.

And a dot flared up on it — not from the test list he had thrown together himself for checking, but from out there, outside. Magnitude, location, time.

“Holy crap,” Tommy breathed into the empty room. “It worked. It actually worked.”

coordinates placed the dot exactly where it had shaken. mag made it swell — the tremor was strong. time made it bright — brand new, a couple of minutes old. He recognized his own fields from the morning form, only now they were alive.

Tommy sat like a kid by a train window and couldn’t look away. Off the coast of Chile, there had been a quake five minutes ago — there it is, a fresh bright dot. Somewhere in Asia, a new tremor flared up. The old ones slowly faded at the edges. This wasn’t happening in his head or in the code — it was happening on the planet, right now. And the AI found out about it on its own — Tommy didn’t lift a finger.

A minute later the dots froze. USGS took a pause — didn’t send anything new.

Tommy jerked as if to say: broken? But the map didn’t go white, didn’t throw an error, didn’t lie with emptiness. It just held the last picture and waited calmly. That very Plan B they had built in with Sam under pressure. Silence turned out not to be a breakdown — it was the world’s honest state: the ground doesn’t shake every second.

flowchart LR
  K["1. Scaffold
with no data"] --> C["2. Cable
to the source"] --> T["3. Task in words —
what, where,
if it goes quiet"]
  T --> P{"4. Agent asks
for access — you read
and allow?"}
  P -->|"yes"| L["5. Check
on live data"] --> Q["6. Silence check —
service goes quiet —
picture holds?"]
  P -->|"no"| N["Agent doesn’t go
for the data"]

2. How to pull data from someone else’s site

The radar was alive — but it looked drab. Gray, default, like a sketch. Tommy remembered yesterday’s trick and wanted the same polish, only now on his own, cleanly done.

“Sam, let’s make it look good. We’ll hook up a site parser and copy the style from Stripe.”

This is a different cable — firecrawl, and this time with a key: trial mode won’t get you far. Tommy had already gone to firecrawl.dev, grabbed his fc-..., and now he needs to tell Sam to connect the mcp cable.

Out of habit, his hand started to toss the key into Sam’s chat — just to be safe. And froze.

“No, no.” Tommy snorted at himself. “The key stays out of the chat and out of the repository. A day without a leaked key doesn’t get zeroed out.”

claude mcp add --transport http firecrawl https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer fc-YOUR_KEY"
claude mcp list          # firecrawl → ✓ Connected

The cable is connected. Next — in words:

“Sam, through firecrawl go to stripe.com, grab the style — colors, typography, gradients — and remake our radar in that spirit.”

The agent goes off for a couple of seconds. The gray radar transforms: deep background, clean typography, soft transitions. Expensive. It looks like Stripe — but it’s its own thing, not a copy. Tommy slowly exhaled. Now this is no hack job, this is a real piece.

He leaned back and looked over what had been assembled. A map with live tremors that arrive on their own. An expensive look, pulled from someone else’s site. And all of it — not him copying with his hands, but the AI doing it through two mcp cables: one brought data through a ready-made window, the other crawled onto a site that doesn’t have one.

There’s no door you can’t kick open. And the project is built. From an empty folder to a live radar — in one sitting.

3. The same trick on another service

Toward evening, Tony poked his head in the door — with a small favor.

“Tommy, help me out. A friend needs a simple little page. He does a bit of crypto trading and wants the bitcoin rate hanging large on the site — live, self-updating. Not an exchange, not a trading terminal, God forbid. Just a block where you can see: the number is real, not drawn.”

Tommy nods and turns back to the laptop. It clicked in his head: this is the same radar, only with price instead of tremors. The same trick, different service.

“Sam,” he writes, as usual. “This is an exchange service, but it’s all the same. Connect the mcp cable to the rate, pull the current bitcoin price, and put it in a large line on the page. If the service goes quiet, keep the last price, don’t reset to zero.”

Exchange instead of USGS — but the scheme is the same: window, cable, response, picture. And here the mcp cable needs a key. Tommy’s hand habitually drifted to paste it straight into the chat — and froze halfway.

The same trick, a different service: the radar — USGS, the quakes cable without a key, the response — tremors, the picture — dots on a map; the rate page — an exchange service, a cable with a key, the response — the current bitcoin price, the picture — a large live number. The third row is your service: what window it has, whether it needs a key, what comes in the response, how to show it. One scheme: window, cable, response, picture; if the service goes quiet — keep the last one The same trick — a different service Window Cable Response Picture Radar USGS quakeswithout a key tremors dots on a map Bitcoinrate exchange service mcp cablekey — out of the chat current price large numberlive, self-updating Yourservice what windowdoes it have? is there a cable?need a key? what comesin response? how toshow it? One scheme. If the service goes quiet — keep the last one, don’t blank the screen or reset to zero

“A-ah.” Tommy snorted at himself. “Almost got caught.”

He put the key into the cable connection command, outside the conversation, just like Alex taught him. Sam built the page. Where the scaffold had hung a dead “BTC — 00000,” the number twitched and updated: the real rate, refreshed a couple of seconds ago. Tommy refreshed the page — the number changed. Once more — different again. Alive.

He sent the link to Tony. An hour later the phone pinged with a bank notification — a small amount, but nice. The first money he earned with AI. In practice, he had done almost nothing by hand. This is a money-printing machine!

Tommy turned the phone over, reread it. For what, really? For a number that is being pulled from somewhere, not even by him, but by the AI through an mcp cable. He snorted and shoved the phone into his pocket — but something inside already felt different. Before, he had been churning out toys for himself. And now, for the first time, he had made something a person paid for with real money.

And then he got carried away. The first money was still warming his pocket, a pizza for ten thousand bitcoin flashed through his head, and on a wave of adrenaline he opened a chat with Tom2036. If this guy from the future is so smart, let him earn his keep.

Tommy scanned it and snorted. Solid black blotches — as if someone had gone over half the lines with a marker. Pictures, riddles — the channel always had enough for that, but here he had asked straight up, on point, about money — and got trash in return. Strange: about tremors and pizza Tom2036 chatted freely, but as soon as he brought up profit, the text seemed to be eaten from the inside.

“You’re a cheapskate, not an oracle,” Tommy muttered and was already about to close the chat. But his eye caught two intact words that had survived in the mess: “dunce” — that’s what he likes to call himself, and, at the tail end, untouched — fuse. A strange word. What does it have to do with money? He shrugged. Some nonsense. He closed the chat.