Tool Strategy

Exposing all 60+ tools to an agent at once is wasteful: every tool’s schema is injected into the model’s context on every request, and a long list makes the model slower and more likely to pick the wrong tool. But trimming the toolset would cost capability.

zaileys-mcp solves this with progressive tool disclosure — the default progressive strategy.

How it works

1. On startup, all 60+ tools are registered, but only a core set (~13 daily-driver tools) stays enabled. The rest are registered disabled, so they don’t appear in the client’s tools/list and never enter the agent’s context.
2. A meta-tool, find_tools, is always available. When the agent needs something the visible tools don’t cover — managing a group, blocking a contact, creating a newsletter — it calls find_tools with a short description or a category name.
3. find_tools ranks the inactive catalog (by name, category, and description keywords), enables the top matches, and the server emits MCP’s notifications/tools/list_changed. The client re-fetches the tool list, and the matched tools are now callable — on the very next step.

Agent: "add +62 811… to the Weekend group as admin"
  → find_tools("add member to group")
      activated: group_add, group_promote, group_member_add_mode, …
  → group_add({ group, participants })
  → group_promote({ group, participants })

The agent’s context grows only by the handful of tools it actually needs, when it needs them — not by 60 up front.

The core set

Always active under progressive:

me · check_number · list_chats · get_messages · get_profile · send_text · send_media · send_location · react · chat_mark_read · send_typing · group_metadata · find_tools

These cover the overwhelming majority of requests; everything else is one find_tools call away.

Choosing a strategy

await serveMcp(client, { tools: 'full' })
await serveMcp(client, { tools: ['send_text', 'send_media', 'get_messages'] })

Or via env: ZAILEYS_TOOLS=full, ZAILEYS_TOOLS=send_text,get_messages.