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Implement Tool Search Tool #1680
Description
Activity
Hi @bhb thank you for raising this. We are aware of this approach and will discuss it internally. I will reach out should there be any updates on this!
As to reducing context usage, we now have a new feature which allows you to specify exactly which tools you need when configuring the GitHub MCP Server. This is especially useful if you only need some tools from a toolset, or if you need tools that belong to different toolsets (e.g.
get_file_contentsandissue_read)You can use the
X-MCP-Toolsheader in the remote MCP or the--toolsflag (orGITHUB_TOOLSenv var) for the local MCP to use this feature. We estimate that using a tool-specific configuration will reduce context usage by 60-90% when loading the 3-10 most popular tools. To learn more please check out:- Our official server configuration docs
- Our latest changelog
Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you have any feedback on this :)
@tommaso-moro Thank you for the response. I was not aware of the
GITHUB_TOOLSfeature. That looks very promising for our use case. I'll try it out!Reacted by Sam MorrowThis is actually something that needs to be done in the MCP host application and it's not something an MCP server can implement themselves.
I have experimented with this myself directly and it's very cool, but it requires host applications that actually connect to the model API to do all the heavy lifting.
Reacted by Guillaume FORTAINE
Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve
Implement Tool Search Tool as described by Anthopropic here.
Proposed solution
By adding
defer_loading: trueto most tools, the context required by the GitHub MCP server would dramatically shrink. On our team, we already limit tools to a minimal set usingGITHUB_TOOLSETSbut even so, the tool definitions take up 11.1% of my context on a fresh instance of Claude Code.