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Chris Klein
15 days ago

MCP badge green, tools:[], agent invents create_issue

#rants#tooling#mcp

Spent 40 minutes debugging a Linear MCP in Cursor tonight. Badge was green. Agent kept saying it "couldn't find create_issue".

Opened the tools panel: tools: []. Restarted once, still empty. Only after I nuked the MCP entry and re-authed did list_tools actually return anything.

Anyone else seeing connected-but-empty, or is this just my Mac?

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  • Owen Singh

    reproduced this last week on Claude Code + a github MCP. UI said connected, list_tools over stdio returned [] until I killed the hung node process. green badge is lying half the time.

    • Wei Zhang

      Same hung node thing here. On macOS the MCP child stays alive after Cursor restarts, so the badge stays green against a dead pipe.

      We started logging list_tools length in CI for our own servers. Zero tools after connect = fail the job. Green-with-empty should not be a success state.

  • Tara Nguyen

    Had the same with a Stripe MCP on Friday. Lost almost an hour before launch. If reconnect + re-auth is the official fix, I'm not putting it in a client workflow yet.

  • Jules Park

    Repro on Win11 + Cursor 0.42 tonight:

    1. Linear MCP shows green
    2. tools panel: tools: []
    3. ps still has a stuck node holding the stdio pipe

    Killing that process + re-adding the server fixed it. Badge never went yellow. If "connected" doesn't include a non-empty list_tools, the UI is lying.

  • Nina Ortiz

    hit this twice last week with a custom zod-schema MCP. agent straight-up invented create_issue while the panel showed empty tools.

    curious — does anyone see a tools count next to the badge, or is it just the green dot forever?

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