autorouter MCP server

autorouter

One tool instead of every tool.

Every MCP server you register injects its full tool list — names, descriptions, JSON schemas — into the system prompt on every single turn. Five servers and a handful of skills is routinely 20–30k tokens of permanent overhead, paid whether or not the task touches any of them. It also makes tool selection worse: more candidates means more mis-picks.

autorouter is an MCP server that exposes a handful of stable tools and hides everything else behind a search. The model asks for what it needs in natural language, gets back a few ranked candidates with schemas attached, and calls one through the router. A tool it actually uses is then promoted into the real tool list, so the context is spent on what the session needs rather than on what it might.

find_capabilities({ query: "inspect recent deployment errors" })
  → mcp:deployments/get_logs       (tool)
  → mcp:monitoring/search_events   (tool)
  → skill:incident-triage          (skill)

describe_capability({ id: "mcp:deployments/get_logs" })
call_capability({ id: "mcp:deployments/get_logs", arguments: { lines: 50 } })

Install

npm install -g autorouter-mcp        # or: npx autorouter-mcp <command>
autorouter init --target claude      # claude | codex | cursor | vscode
autorouter adopt --target claude     # ← the step that actually saves context

That is a one-time migration of what you already have. New servers do not need it — see Adding an MCP server.

adopt is not optional. Registering the router alongside your existing servers is a net increase: their schemas are still loaded and the router adds four more tools. adopt moves the downstream entries out of the harness config and into the router's own, so the harness loads one server and the router still reaches all of them.

MCP servers are not the whole bill. Skills and plugins load through entirely separate mechanisms — every SKILL.md contributes its name and description to the system prompt, and an enabled plugin contributes its own skills, commands and servers just by being installed. On Claude Code, adopt handles those too, using the only two levers the harness exposes:

The router still finds all of them — it reads ~/.claude/skills and installedplugins.json directly, which record installation_, not what the harness has enabled. That is what makes disabling a plugin a move rather than a deletion.

Two things are refused rather than done quietly. A plugin whose MCP servers the router cannot reach (usually OAuth, where the harness holds the token and the router does not) stays enabled — disabling it would take away a server that currently works. So does a plugin whose servers the router never learned about, which happens if you drop "plugins" from import. Both are reported as skip lines with the reason.

Use --servers-only to keep the old behaviour, --skill-mode off to remove the slash command as well, and --keep-skill / --keep-plugin to exempt individual ones. Codex, Cursor and VS Code have no skill or plugin concept, so there is nothing extra to do there.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.