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 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, the web documentation, and help(topic="docs") for local routing guidance.

Notes#

mcp_smoke_test requires the scratchpad and todo feature tools 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.