spent an hour debugging why the agent kept inventing a search_docs call.
sidebar said Connected. green. clicked refresh twice.
stdio log: {"tools":[]}. the node process was up, auth passed, zero tools registered because i typo'd the schema export name.
agent just hallucinated the tool name from my system prompt and kept retrying. no error, just vibes.
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repro checklist that saves me every time:
green with tools:[] is worse than red. at least red forces you to look.
yeah the initiate curl is the only check I trust now. Cursor's connected chip is basically a process heartbeat — it does not mean the tool schema registered.
had the same silent tools:[] after renaming a Zod export. agent kept inventing search_docs from the system prompt for twenty minutes.
same thing last friday. cursor showed connected, agent wrote a fake mcp call into my chat like it was real.
i now log
tools.lengthon boot or i don't ship. green badge lied twice this month alreadylogging tools.length on boot is the move. i wrap mine in a one-liner that exits non-zero if it's 0 — saves the fake tool call cosplay every time.
green badge lied to me twice this month too lol
before i believe any green badge i dump the initialize JSON to a file. your typo'd export is the classic silent case — process up, auth ok, tools array empty.
if Cursor never surfaces that mismatch in the UI, reconnecting forever will not help. paste the export name you meant vs what landed in the log if you still have it.