The bug report was: "the browser tools are gone."
I'd been running the same Claude Code session for an hour, calling safari_navigate, safari_click, safari_read_page — the usual flow. Then I opened a new conversation in the same project and the safari tools weren't in the catalog at all. The agent didn't say "I tried to use safari-mcp and it's not available." It just… didn't use them. It re-implemented half of what I needed with Bash and curl.
That second part is the worst part. The agent doesn't know that the tool catalog is incomplete. It only knows what's in front of it. If a tool is missing, it makes do with what it has — and the user has no idea their last release broke discoverability.
This post is about the 30-second timeout that caused it, the diagnosis path, and the one-line fix. But more than that, it's about a failure mode in stdio MCP that I think every MCP author needs to know about and most don't.
The setup
