Originally published on Hashnode . Cross-posted for the DEV.to community. The first time I gave Claude Code access to my Shopify store via MCP, I felt like a wizard. The agent could read orders, query products, and pull customer data with a single command. The second time, I realized I had no idea what would happen if a prompt accidentally instructed it to delete a product or push a price update. That afternoon I went deep on MCP security. What I found was that most tutorials skip past it entirely and most production setups I've seen are dangerously permissive. This is the playbook I built for myself, the actual mistakes I caught in my own setup, and what every developer using MCP servers should be doing before connecting anything important. Why MCP Security Is Different MCP is the bridge between an LLM and the rest of your stack. Once you connect an MCP server, the agent can call functions, read data, and in many cases write data on your behalf.…