[kerlenton]

The catalog approach is appropriate for MCP as well. Something I would be interested in: once you have all of your services/APIs/DBs exposed via one MCP server, the next choke point will become the model of selecting the correct tool. After the first dozens of tools, agents select the wrong tool (or nothing) more often than it would be expected.

How does Marmot cope with it? Are all of the tools exposed in a flat way, or there is a scoping/search step which allows an agent to select between only a few tools out of the catalog?

[charlie-haley]

Hey, good question. Marmot is designed to be as generic as possible. An "Asset", whether it's a database, glossary term, topic, API or anything else, has the exact same schema, API endpoint and MCP tool. The MCP server exposes 3 tools: discover_data, find_ownership and lookup_term. Scoping happens as filters and arguments to discover_data, and it's summary-first, so a broad query returns counts or provider breakdowns rather than dumping every asset into context, and the agent narrows from there. The search step is really the primary interface here.

[kerlenton]

Makes sense. 3 generic tools + summarize first is a nice approach to sidestepping the problem of too many tools. But it looks like it shifts the chokepoint around rather than eliminating it: instead of "choose the proper tool out of many", it shifts to "formulate the appropriate query to discover_data from the summary".

But in real applications, does the model reliably drill down from the general summary, or does it often just hang around at the level of the summary?