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Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
MCP server developers often create tools with overly long descriptions without realizing that downstream LLM providers have context length limitations. This leads to issues where:
- Tool descriptions that work fine in testing fail when integrated with certain LLM providers
- Different LLMs have varying sensitivities to tool description lengths
- The combined length of tool titles, descriptions, and parameter descriptions all consume context window space
Describe the solution you'd like
Add warnings/indicators in the MCP Inspector when:
- Tool descriptions exceed common length thresholds (e.g., warn at 500 characters, alert at 1000)
- Tool names exceed typical limits (e.g., 64 characters)
- The combined length of all tool metadata (title + description + parameter descriptions) exceeds reasonable thresholds
The Inspector could display:
- Visual indicators (eg yellow or red highlighting) when exceeding recommended limits
- A tooltip or info box explaining that these limits vary by LLM provider but providing general guidance
- Total context usage estimate for all tools combined
Describe alternatives you've considered
- Adding hard limits to the MCP specification itself (rejected as too prescriptive since limits vary by provider and may change over time)
- Only documenting best practices in the User Guide (helpful but doesn't provide immediate feedback during development)
- Leaving it to individual host implementations like Cursor to warn users (too far downstream from where the issue originates)