Okay, 100+ tools on a single MCP is asking for trouble really quickly. But it certainly wasn’t on purpose.
Building out what is essentially a digital employee requires it.
Time for a little thought experiment. Think about the number of tasks a customer service representative or IT administrator does in a day. Now take those tasks, and think about the tools needed. It’s not always 1:1. A single task can require many tools.
Let’s use a return for this example. The return tool is just the beginning. To complete a return, you also need:
- Customer and order lookup tools to obtain the information
- A KYC tool to make sure you’re talking to the right person
- A shipping label tool to generate a label
A return requires at least four tools to complete, and some tasks might require more. Now, when I say 100 tools, that number might not seem as significant. In reality, Hal and Ben might be only capable of 20 or 30 actual tasks as a result.
Yes, it’s bad to place all your tools on a single server. But for testing, one “monolith” as Kiro has taken to refer to the original MCP server is fine.
Also, there is such a thing as too many tools: one beta server also allows you to spot areas of overlap. We were able to spot this much more easily on a single server versus five separate ones, eliminating ~10 tools as a result through merging tools with similar operations.
It’s also much easier to fix bugs when everything is in one spot. But in a production environment, of course, you want to split things up.
(I will add to give attackers less of an opportunity to guess your new setup, keep the old MCP running until you’ve set everything up, then switch over. A stealth deployment makes sense here.)