Why I built QuizMCP.

A good quiz question isn’t a fact. It’s a small puzzle — a couple of clues converging on something everyone in the room already knows, with one wink at the end that makes getting there feel earned. That part is genuinely fun to write, and it is not the part that needs software.

Everything around it does. Unless I planned days ahead I could never get a quiz fully ready, and even then I’d forget ideas, lose questions between rounds, and burn hours nudging text boxes around a slide.

The quiz that made the point

In June 2026 I built one the wrong way, and it turned out to be the most useful thing that could have happened. I didn’t use a tool — I used a chat window. I dropped in a Word document with “actually build the whole PPT, I’ll go change it there.” Rounds two and three got added conversationally. An audio round was bolted on late. It worked. The quiz was good.

But look at how I found the questions. “search for memories and find me the Pizza Bakery…”, “fetch my paris panini company q”, “look more carefully, in other repo > search history”. Questions I’d written months earlier, recovered by grepping old chat logs — because that was the only place they existed.

Then, a month later: “where is my quiz, can you take me to it?” The deck was gone. Not deleted — just unfindable, which amounts to the same thing.

So I built it for myself first

Read that story back and the product designs itself. Conversation was already the interface, so the interface should be MCP. The questions needed somewhere durable and searchable to live, so that’s the core of it. The deck was going to be hand-edited after export regardless, so export is a starting point and not a final render.

I now have a question bank that grows every time I host, and I can put a full quiz together from the back of a cab. That’s the whole ambition, and it’s the reason I trust it — I’m not guessing at what a quizmaster needs, I’m the one filing the bug reports.

And the conspicuous absence: nothing in that story needed the platform to be clever. An AI was already in the loop — my own, one I’d chosen and trusted. Putting a second one on the server would have been a downgrade wearing a feature’s clothes.

So QuizMCP doesn’t think. It remembers, it scopes, and it exports. Your AI does the rest.

An earlier version tried to be much more: a server-side ingest pipeline, a drag-and-drop composer, a live linter, a public gallery. None of it got used, including by me — and that’s the most useful piece of product research on this page. Breadth was the mistake. What’s left is the part that was actually missing.