# Setup and support MCP tools

Setup and support tools help clients discover Solo MCP capabilities, verify the integration, prepare agent instructions, and draft feedback.

## Tools

- `help` — Discover Solo MCP capabilities and official documentation. Call with no arguments for an overview, pass `topic` for local guidance, or pass `query` to search Solo's hosted documentation.
- `mcp_tools_summary` — List enabled Solo MCP tools by category with one-line descriptions and no input schemas. Useful when tool discovery is noisy or a compact catalog is enough.
- `mcp_smoke_test` — Run a disposable end-to-end check in the effective project. It creates, reads, updates, and deletes one scratchpad plus one todo, then verifies both are gone.
- `submit_solo_feedback` — Queue a prefilled draft for Solo's [feedback form](../troubleshooting/reporting-issues.md) and bring the main window forward, so a person can review and submit it. Drafts open one at a time in the order they arrived, and a new draft never replaces one that's being edited.
- `setup_agent_integration` — Add a `## Solo Integration` section to `CLAUDE.md` (the default `target`, `claude`) or `AGENTS.md` (`target: "agents"`) in the effective project, creating the file if needed. If the file already contains that section, the tool leaves it unchanged.

## Help topics

`help` accepts these topics: `processes`, `timers`, `coordination`, `locks`, `scratchpads`, `todos`, `spawning`, `inspection`, `readiness`, `projects`, `docs`, and `solo.yml`. Common aliases also resolve, including `services`, `ports`, `urls`, `ready`, `status`, `inspect`, `kv`, `scope`, `howto`, `guide`, `yml`, and `yaml`.

The overview response is general capability guidance. It reflects whether key-value tools are enabled, but describes several other feature-tool groups even when their callable tools are disabled. Use `mcp_tools_summary` for the exact catalog of tools enabled in the current Solo installation.

## Searching official documentation

Call `help(query="How do I move a project?")` for a lightweight search of Solo's published documentation. The query must contain 2–200 characters after whitespace is normalized, and it can't be combined with `topic`.

Solo makes one best-effort request and returns up to five ranked results. Each result includes an excerpt plus absolute URLs for the agent-readable Markdown page and the corresponding web page. The query is the only caller-provided data sent to the hosted search; Solo doesn't send project, process, or MCP session context.

The search isn't retried when the hosted documentation is unavailable. The response still points the client to the [Markdown documentation index](https://soloterm.com/api/v1/docs), the [web documentation](https://soloterm.com/docs), and `help(topic="docs")` for local routing guidance.

## Notes

`mcp_smoke_test` requires the [scratchpad](./scratchpads.md) and [todo feature tools](./todos.md) to be enabled, which also means the Todos and Scratchpads features must be on in **Settings > Features**. If a step fails, it attempts best-effort cleanup of its scratchpad artifact and independently attempts best-effort cleanup of its todo artifact.

`setup_agent_integration` writes project-facing agent instructions so future agent sessions know how to use Solo MCP in that repository. The section is short. It tells agents to:

- check for `SOLO_PROCESS_ID` to tell whether they're running inside Solo;
- call the Solo MCP `help` tool to discover capabilities;
- reuse an existing configured command, such as a dev server, instead of launching a duplicate, and avoid opening Solo terminals just to run one-off commands.

Review those files like any other project instruction change.

Feedback drafts last only until Solo quits. Solo holds up to 8 pending drafts, at most 64 KiB each and 256 KiB in total; larger drafts, or drafts sent while the queue is full, are rejected with an error.

For the built-in playbooks exposed through the MCP prompt protocol, see [MCP prompts and resources](./prompts-and-resources.md).

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Are you a human? Read this doc on the web: https://soloterm.com/docs/mcp-tools/setup-support