Your MCP server's tools are confusing your agent. I built a linter that scores them.

A developer has released mcp-lint, an open-source Python design linter for Model Context Protocol servers that scores a server's tools/list output out of 100 and flags issues such as missing descriptions, vague names, unpaginated list tools, destructive tools without confirmation hints, and empty or bloated schemas. The stdlib-only, MIT-licensed tool supports a --fail-under flag to act as a CI gate, and is positioned as a design-quality counterpart to the author's earlier mcp-tax token-cost auditor.

Over on r/mcp, a recurring complaint from people wiring up their first servers goes something like: "I wired up 4–5 MCP servers and I still can't design one from scratch. When is something a tool vs a resource? Why does my agent keep calling the wrong thing?" That confusion is almost never a transport problem — it's a design problem. Tools with no description. Names like handle data . List endpoints that dump everything with no pagination. delete tools that never hint at confirmation. Bad tool design wastes context and confuses agents, and nobody was checking for it statically. So I built mcp-lint : a design linter for MCP servers. Point it at your tools/list output and get a design score out of 100, with every finding named: mcp-lint audit — 4 tool s , design score: 85/100 handle data score 64/100 - missing-description tool has no description -20 - vague-name name contains a vague filler word -6 - empty-schema inputSchema has no properties at all -10 list issues score 90/100 - no-pagination list-style tool has no limit/offset/cursor/page param -10 delete repo score 85/100 - destructive-no-confirm destructive tool description has no confirm/approve/dry-run hint -15 Eight rules total — missing or rambling descriptions over 600 chars is its own finding: context tax , vague names, unpaginated list tools, destructive tools with no confirmation hint, empty schemas, schema bloat. Each tool starts at 100 and loses points; the server score is the mean. git clone https://github.com/hahahahahahahahah6/mcp-lint cd mcp-lint python3 mcp lint.py audit tools.json human-readable table python3 mcp lint.py audit tools.json --json machine-readable python3 mcp lint.py audit tools.json --fail-under 80 exit 1 if score < 80 CI gate tools.json is either a tools/list JSON-RPC result or a bare array of {name, description, inputSchema} . The --fail-under flag makes it a CI gate: score below 80, the build fails. It's a sibling to mcp-tax my other tool , different axis: mcp-tax audits token cost — how much context your server burns. mcp-lint audits design quality — whether the tools are shaped well enough for an agent to use correctly. A server can be cheap and still unusable, or well-designed and still expensive. Run both. Stdlib only, Python 3.9+. MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/hahahahahahahahah6/mcp-lint https://github.com/hahahahahahahahah6/mcp-lint What's the worst-designed MCP tool you've seen in the wild — the one your agent kept calling wrong?