Experiences with many MCP servers active?

[darinkishore]

Hi! Super cool work.

What does it look like (re: reliability) when Claude has access to like 10-15 different MCP servers? Is that too much?

I haven't tried claude's function calling, but I know with GPT, something like 10-20 complicated functions will be extremely unreliable.

Is the thinking behind the list tools endpoint to mitigate that? Is it reccomended--or has anyone tried--to "layer" MCP servers (perhaps between different agents)?

My thinking with this is having a higher level claude delegate higher level actions (like "research this topic") to lower level claudes (who would have access to search, artifact functionality, maybe act as a moderator in a multi-agent discourse (STORM)).

[jeremydanielfox]

Hi there! This is a great question. These are both valid approaches -- both a "delegate" model, as well as a "give main Claude all the tools" are potentially workable approaches.

My recommendation is to first do the simple thing that works. Start off by just adding all the tools to Claude. See how far you can get by continuing to give Claude tools, without resorting to any sort of delegate model. Eventually, you may start to see performance degradations here -- at this point, it would be worth it to make sure the tool descriptions/prompts you have for each tool are good. Ideally, each tool has a few examples showing Claude how to use it, as well as potentially how not to use it.

If at this point you are still finding that Claude isn't using tools as you would want, you could look into something like a delegation approach. This is probably going to be more difficult, so I would wait to do this until you have exhausted the ability of the main Claude to handle all the tools. The good news is that if you do get to this point, you would be able to use these tools with the delegate Claude (you won't have wasted effort here).

Good luck on this!