The Problem

Model Context Protocol (MCP) lets an AI agent call structured tools instead of guessing from raw text dumped into a context window. Fine in theory — but most MCP integrations just expose "read file" and "search," which barely improves on copy-pasting code into a chat window.

The real question: what tools should an agent actually have access to, for codebase work specifically?

Architecture: Three Tool Categories

Spiderbrain's MCP server exposes 28 tools, split into three functional groups: