Skills and llms.txt

Install MCP Inspect agent skills for setup, compatibility-check triage, deprecation, telemetry and surface review. Read the docs as Markdown through llms.txt.

Machine-readable surfaces, generated from the same source as the pages you are reading. llms.txt and skill discovery are opt-in proposals; their presence does not guarantee that a search engine or agent will use them.

URL	What it is
`/llms.txt`	Every page, titled and linked, in the llms.txt format.
`/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json`	Skill discovery manifest, per the Agent Skills Discovery RFC. Each entry carries a `sha256` of its source.
`/sitemap.xml`	The usual.

#The skills

Five, each a procedure rather than a summary of these pages. A skill earns its place only if it tells an agent something it would otherwise get wrong.

Skill	Use it for
`mcp-inspect-setup`	Adding MCP Inspect to a repository: config, baseline, CI.
`mcp-inspect-triage`	Reading a failing check and deciding what to do about it.
`mcp-inspect-deprecate`	Retiring a tool or an argument without breaking callers.
`mcp-inspect-instrument`	Adding usage telemetry, or exporting to OpenTelemetry instead.
`mcp-surface-review`	Reviewing a surface before anyone depends on it.

#Using them

These skills describe the local and CI workflows available through approved preview access. Install the preview CLI before asking an agent to run those steps. Public CLI and Action package releases are pending. The plugin's GitHub marketplace source is private; use the public skill files below instead of a repository-based installation.

An agent that supports the discovery RFC finds them from the manifest. Otherwise fetch a SKILL.md directly, or vendor it:

mkdir -p .claude/skills/mcp-inspect-setup
curl -sL https://mcprobe.dev/skills/mcp-inspect-setup/SKILL.md \
  -o .claude/skills/mcp-inspect-setup/SKILL.md

The manifest's sha256 lets a client cache a skill and know when it has changed.

Every docs page has a .md companion advertised by an HTML rel="alternate" link. For example, fetch this page as Markdown. Prefer a specific page to the full documentation when possible.

Every HTML page links to /llms.txt with rel="describedby" and advertises the skill manifest with rel="agent-skills". The latter is a discovery hint for clients that recognize it; the RFC's well-known URL remains the entry point.

#Why the rule reference is generated

Every rule id on this site is generated from the diff engine's own registry. Rule ids are a public API — .mcp-inspect.yml silences by id, the JSON report carries them, and the SARIF output emits a helpUri per rule that points at a heading on that page.

A hand-written reference would drift from the engine the first time someone added a rule in a hurry, and the symptom would be a link in a customer's CI annotation that describes a different rule. So the page is derived, and a check in CI fails when it is stale.

#What an agent should not conclude

The one thing worth stating to a machine as plainly as to a person: usage data proves the absence of observed usage, never the absence of all possible consumers. Nothing in this product says anything is safe to remove, and an agent reading its output should not either. The strongest available phrasing is "no recorded calls in the requested N-day window", with coverage limits. Client software/version cohorts are not consumers. Argument absence is unknown without complete collection and exact contract attribution; estimated volume cannot increase confidence.

For automation, read the JSON check report, including on exit 1. A status: "skipped" / compared: false report means no comparison ran even though the process exits 0. Multi-server checks contain named reports in a single JSON document; select --server <name> for the single-report shape.