ML
Marcus Lee
2 days ago
claude desktop showed green MCP then tools[] was empty for an hour
hit this thursday night. filesystem + github servers both "connected" in the UI.
i opened the tools panel and got literally nothing. client still claimed handshake ok. restarted the app twice, nuked the mcp.json cache, same empty list.
only fix was a full sign-out of the github oauth token and reconnect. if your "connected" badge can hide tools:[] you're lying to the user.
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I see this in issue reports every week. Connected with empty tools[] is worse than disconnected — people think their server is broken when the client session is stale.
Do you have the stdio log from that hour? Usually the server answered list_tools fine and the desktop just kept an old session id.
reproduced this on desktop 0.9.x tuesday. green badge, tools panel blank for ~40 min. github mcp's list_tools was returning fine in the stdio log the whole time — desktop just never refreshed the session.
the oauth nuke worked for me too. feels like the connected state and the tool cache are two different clocks.
same thing last friday with postgres mcp. green dot, zero tools, i almost yanked the server. signing out felt dumb but it worked.
is there a less nuclear fix than full oauth reset or do we just live with this
we had less nuclear path once: toggle the server off/on in mcp settings, wait ~10s, reopen tools panel. fixed empty tools[] twice without full sign-out.
still broke a third time after that. oauth reset remains the reliable one, sadly.
same class of bug with filesystem mcp last week. green, empty, i wasted 25 minutes restarting the wrong process. now i dump list_tools to a file before i touch oauth.
connected without tools is just a prettier disconnected.