I put everything an agent needs to work in my framework into an MCP resource. Conventions, workflows, which files are generated, where secrets come from. It was accurate, it was complete, and it was one call away.
The agent almost never read it.
Meanwhile I was doing that job by hand. Stopping it mid-task. Correcting the same thing for the fourth time. Re-reviewing work I had stopped trusting three steps earlier. The knowledge existed, it was cheap to fetch, and it never arrived. I spent a while assuming I was prompting wrong.
I was not. A resource is passive. Passive means the agent has to decide to look, and it does not decide to look, because nothing tells it there is anything worth looking at. I had solved content and shipped zero delivery.
That is the part I had backwards. The four places you can put knowledge for an agent are not four kinds of content. They are four trigger conditions, and each one bills differently.
