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Tokyo Transit: How MCP Helped Me Fix a Broken Multi-Agent System

A developer built Tokyo Transportation MCP, an AI-powered transit assistant that uses MCP and skill-based agent workflows to provide conversational route guidance for Tokyo's complex rail system. The project was rebuilt from an earlier abandoned multi-agent experiment after the developer learned to structure the system around modular skills and clearer agent behavior. The assistant answers natural-language queries about routes, transfers, and timing, aiming to make Tokyo's multi-operator transit network more accessible through AI.

read2 min publishedMay 30, 2026

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

Tokyo’s train system is incredible—but it can also be overwhelming. Multiple rail operators, dense transfer stations, and complicated route decisions make even simple trips confusing, especially for visitors.

There are already transit apps out there, but most still feel static. They give information, but they don’t really reason through the trip experience. Some even lock basic features behind paywalls.

That pushed me to build something different.

I built Tokyo Transportation MCP, an AI-powered transit assistant that uses MCP and skill-based agent workflows to retrieve and organize Tokyo transit information in a more natural, conversational way.

Instead of jumping between maps and apps, users can ask questions like “What’s the best route from Shinjuku to Maihama?” and receive clear, practical guidance with transfers, timing, and routing context.

More than just route calculation, the project is about making one of the world’s most complex transit systems feel easier to understand through AI agents.

🔗Repo: Link This project actually started much earlier as a simple Tokyo transportation agent.

At the time, I was experimenting with early multi-agent workflows and system prompting with the Hugging Face

ecosystem. But honestly, the tooling and orchestration patterns were still under development, and I struggled to make the agents behave reliably. The system worked sometimes, but not consistently enough to feel usable.

Eventually, I shelved the project.

Later on, after learning more about MCP architecture and Skill-based systems, I realized I finally had a cleaner way to structure the idea. Instead of forcing complex orchestration too early, I rebuilt the project around modular skills, clearer agent behavior, and more reliable transit retrieval workflows.

What started as an abandoned experiment slowly turned into a much more practical and stable AI transit assistant.

The project is still under active development, and there are plenty of improvements and edge cases left to tackle. But reaching the point where it functions as a stable MCP-powered transit tool feels like a meaningful milestone.

GitHub Copilot helped speed up the rebuild, especially when I moved toward MCP and Skill-based design.

A big part of this project wasn’t just coding — it was designing Skill.md

, the instruction layer that defines how the agent should behave and interpret transit tasks. Getting that right required a lot of iteration.

Copilot was useful for scaffolding the MCP tool code and exploring different implementation ideas. It made early prototyping much faster.

From there, the focus shifted to refinement: tightening instructions, adjusting structure, and iterating until the agent behaved consistently in real scenarios.

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