# 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`](/llms.txt)                                                       | Every page, titled and linked, in the [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) format.                                                                                          |
| [`/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json`](/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) | Skill discovery manifest, per the [Agent Skills Discovery RFC](https://github.com/cloudflare/agent-skills-discovery-rfc). Each entry carries a `sha256` of its source. |
| [`/sitemap.xml`](/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`](/skills/mcp-inspect-setup/SKILL.md)           | Adding MCP Inspect to a repository: config, baseline, CI.      |
| [`mcp-inspect-triage`](/skills/mcp-inspect-triage/SKILL.md)         | Reading a failing check and deciding what to do about it.      |
| [`mcp-inspect-deprecate`](/skills/mcp-inspect-deprecate/SKILL.md)   | Retiring a tool or an argument without breaking callers.       |
| [`mcp-inspect-instrument`](/skills/mcp-inspect-instrument/SKILL.md) | Adding usage telemetry, or exporting to OpenTelemetry instead. |
| [`mcp-surface-review`](/skills/mcp-surface-review/SKILL.md)         | 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:

```bash
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](/docs/agents.md). Prefer a
specific page to [the full documentation](/llms-full.txt) 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](/docs/rules) 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](/docs/cli), 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.