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Use MCP servers with your agent

Alfe agents are MCP clients as well as MCP hosts. Any Model Context Protocol server you attach to an agent becomes part of that agent’s toolset: the tools the server advertises show up alongside the agent’s built-in tools, and the agent can call them in the normal course of its work.

This is first-class, not a bolt-on. An agent doesn’t need to know or care whether a given tool comes from its runtime, from an Alfe integration, or from an MCP server you wired up yourself — they’re all just tools it can call.

How an agent hosts MCP servers

Section titled “How an agent hosts MCP servers”

Each agent runs a small MCP host as part of its local runtime. When you attach one or more MCP servers to the agent, the host:

  • Keeps long-lived connections to each server, so tools are ready without a cold start on every turn.
  • Presents one unified toolset. Tools from every attached server are merged into a single catalog the agent sees. Names are namespaced per server, and collisions between servers are disambiguated automatically, so two servers can both expose a search tool without clashing.
  • Routes tool calls back to the server that owns each tool, and returns the result to the agent.

Because the host runs alongside the agent, the servers you attach are scoped to that agent — attaching a server to one agent never exposes its tools to another.

Types of MCP servers

Section titled “Types of MCP servers”

Two broad categories, both consumed the same way once attached:

Category What it is How you add it
Integration-provided servers Curated MCP servers that ship as Alfe integrations — e.g. app and productivity tools. Installing the integration wires the server up for you, including credentials from your connected account. Dashboard, CLI, or the agent itself. See Add an MCP server.
Your own servers Any MCP server you want to attach directly — a local command-line server on the agent’s machine, or a remote server reachable over HTTP. The alfe mcp commands.

Integration-provided servers are the durable, credential-aware path and are managed through the integrations lifecycle. Your own servers are the escape hatch for anything not in the catalog. Both are covered in Add an MCP server to your agent.

Transports

Section titled “Transports”

An agent can consume MCP servers over the standard transports:

  • stdio — a local server the agent launches as a child process (a command with arguments and environment variables).
  • Streamable HTTP and SSE — remote servers the agent connects to over HTTP, optionally with request headers (for example, an authorization token).

Seeing what tools a server exposes

Section titled “Seeing what tools a server exposes”

To check which tools a registered server advertises — useful when a server is attached but its tools aren’t showing up — connect to it briefly and list them:

Terminal window
alfe mcp test <id>

This connects to the server, prints the tools it advertises (with the namespaced names the agent will see), and disconnects. See the alfe mcp reference for the full command set.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”