70 comments

  • technocrat8080 a day ago ago

    How do you folks think about the Manus finding on dynamic tool selection? https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Less...

    > A natural reaction is to design a dynamic action space—perhaps loading tools on demand using something RAG-like. We tried that in Manus too. But our experiments suggest a clear rule: unless absolutely necessary, avoid dynamically adding or removing tools mid-iteration. There are two main reasons for this:

    > 1. In most LLMs, tool definitions live near the front of the context after serialization, typically before or after the system prompt. So any change will invalidate the KV-cache for all subsequent actions and observations.

    > 2. When previous actions and observations still refer to tools that are no longer defined in the current context, the model gets confused. Without constrained decoding, this often leads to schema violations or hallucinated actions.

    > To solve this while still improving action selection, Manus uses a context-aware state machine to manage tool availability. Rather than removing tools, it masks the token logits during decoding to prevent (or enforce) the selection of certain actions based on the current context.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Their findings on KV-cache invalidation are spot on for a single-context approach.

      Strata's architecture is philosophically different. Instead of loading a large toolset and masking it, we guide the LLM through a multi-step dialogue. Each step (e.g., choosing an app, then a category) is a separate, very small, and cheap LLM call.

      So, we trade one massive prompt for a few tiny ones. This avoids the KV-cache issue because the context for each decision is minimal, and it prevents model confusion because the agent only ever sees the tools relevant to its current step. It's a different path to the same goal: making the agent smarter by not overwhelming it. Thanks for the great link!

    • dang a day ago ago

      That article looks great and didn't get attention on HN even though it was posted 9 times - yikes!

      I've sent a repost invite for the first submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44608593) - hopefully it will get some discussion here.

      • helloericsf a day ago ago

        Thanks for reaching out. Just reposted.

  • deepdarkforest a day ago ago

    1. Interesting approach, but the pricing seems 1-2 orders of magnitude too expensive. For your example for slack, It contains 4 calls for an action. Pricing shows 100 dollars per 10k cals, so 1 cent per call. This means, for an agent that lets say does 4 actions, so and your examples show at least 3-4 api calls per action , it's already 12 cents? Similar tools like composio.dev have 200k calls for 29 dollars, so around 70x cheaper (both for the cheapest tier). Even with needing only 1 call for subsequent calls, 1 cent per single api call sounds wrong, at least for our use case it does not economic sense to pay 5-10 cents on top of llm costs on every user query. Apologies if I'm missing something!

    2. Could this not be replicated by others by just handmaking a fuzzy search tool on the tools? I think this is the approach that will win, even with rag for lets say 10k plus tools maybe in the future, but not sure how much differentiation this is in the long term, i've made this search tool myself a couple of times already

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      1. Hi! We noticed this for Strata as well so we are ONLY counting the execute_action in Strata. This means the fee is the same as using the traditional, flat approaches. In other words, the 3 previous calls does not cost you anything!

      2. I think the main drawback of search method is like giving a human lots of tools/APIs but you can ONLY access them via a search interface. This feels weird and should be improved. For our approaches, the step by step methods allow you to see what categories/actions are available. We also provide a documentation search so that you get the best out of both worlds.

      • deepdarkforest a day ago ago

        1. Oh okay great, maybe clarify it in the pricing page? That mcp server call means just execute. But its' still 10x more expensive right?

        2. From what i understand it's just nested search right? It is not anything different, if you do flat or embedding search or fuzzy/agentic nested is a choice for sure, but Im just saying not sure how defensible this is, if all other mcp competitors or even users themselves put in a nested search tool

        • wirehack a day ago ago

          1. Sure, we will clarify that in the pricing page, thank you! As you can see from our evaluation, we are much better than official MCP servers. I think people care more about getting things done correctly. Otherwise, you waste all the model tokens for nothing. We do have enterprise deals where we can work out a customized pricing plan for your specific use case. Come talk to us if you are interested.

          2. One VERY important distinction is that the model is doing the "search" here, not some RAG algorithm or vector database. Therefore, as the model becomes smarter, this approach will be more accurate as well.

          • deepdarkforest a day ago ago

            1. I was not talking about official MCP servers, those are often even free. Im talking about pricing of other devtools for aggregating tools/mcp's. I think this is an obvious space to build i agree, i just worry about differentiation. Its a search space not as big as web search, or complex (order doesnt matter).

            2. Yes, i see, this is what i meant by agentic search. Essentially is a tiny subagent, taking list of tools in and out the relevant ones. Still implementable in 5 mins. But i guess if the experience is very smooth enterprise might pay?

            • wirehack a day ago ago

              1. Yes I agree. To be honest we are a young company (as you can tell we are from YC X25), so we are still figuring out the pricing. But thank you for the feedback and sharing your thoughts.

              2. Yes the idea is not complex once you understand it. But there are some nuances we found along the way and supporting more integrations are always important but requires engineering efforts. Thank you!

      • a day ago ago
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  • nycdatasci a day ago ago

    The attack surface for agents with MCP access grows exponentially with the number of tools. On the scale of thousands of tools, I think it's nearly impossible to understand potential interactions and risk. Do you have any innovative controls in place that would help a CISO get comfortable with a product like this in an enterprise context?

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      That's the critical question. The key is that Strata never exposes all tools to the agent at once. Our progressive guidance acts as a dynamic allowlist, so that the agent only "sees" the specific tools relevant to its immediate task. This fundamentally reduces the blast radius at each step. We do provide a comprehensive audit trails for every action, giving a CISO a centralized control plane to manage and monitor agent capabilities, rather than an exponential risk. If you are interested, come talk to us!

      • daveidol a day ago ago

        How is a “dynamic allowlist” useful if it can still access anything based on what the user prompts? Is there a way to impose a static allowlist too?

        • wirehack a day ago ago

          Yes there is a way to impose a static allowlist. As a very simple example, you can disable certain servers completely via the UI or the API.

          • nativeit 16 hours ago ago

            Isn’t that a blocklist?

    • smrtinsert a day ago ago

      this. This will be the number one obstacle to adoption.

  • progbits a day ago ago

    The fact people are giving credentials to all these MCP tools keeps amazing me.

    Ten years ago if you built a service that asked you for permissions to everything imaginable most people would keep well clear. I guess the closest was Beeper which wanted your social passwords but that was heavily criticized and never very popular.

    Now you slap an AI label on it and you can't keep people away.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      We also provide an open-source version for Strata so that you can have full control. You can self-host it on your own infrastructure, so your credentials never have to touch our servers.

      • progbits a day ago ago

        That's nice, kudos. But trusting you is only half of the problem. I don't trust the LLM either.

        • wirehack a day ago ago

          Yeah I see what you mean. Many MCP clients has the ability to ask human for confirmation before a tool call is executed. In this way, you can check the tool call before it executes.

          • smt88 a day ago ago

            Is there any way for the LLM to bypass the request for human confirmation, or is it hard-coded into the deterministic MCP client code?

            • wirehack a day ago ago

              We do not build the MCP clients, but for many of the clients I believe it is hard-coded into the deterministic client code.

    • electric_muse a day ago ago

      MCP is like the "app store" for LLMs. LLMs can only do so much by themselves. They need connectivity to pull in context or take actions. Just like how your phone without apps is pretty limited in how useful it is.

      Sure, teams could build their own connectors via function calling if they're running agents, but that only gets you so far. MCPs promise universal interoperability.

      Some teams, like Block, are using MCP as a protocol but generally building their own servers.

      But the vast majority are just sifting through the varying quality of published servers out there.

      Those who are getting MCP to work are in the minority right now. Most just aren't doing it or aren't doing it well.

      But there are plenty of companies racing into this space to make this work for enterprises / solve the problems you rightfully bring up.

      As others have said here, the cat is out of the bag, and it is not going back in. MCP has enough buy-in from the community that it's likely to just get better vs. go away.

      Source/Bias disclaimer: I pivoted my company to work on an MCP platform to smooth out those rough edges. We had been building integration technology for years. When a technology came along that promised "documentation + invocation" in-band over the protocol, I quickly saw that this could solve the pain of integration we had suffered for years. No more reading documentation and building integrations. The capability negotiation is built into the protocol.

      Edit: a comma.

    • gk1 a day ago ago

      What do you propose they do? Because although something like Strata makes it easier, the reality is people are piling up MCP servers like they're free cupcakes. There's no getting the cat back in the box.

      (I'm not in security so I genuinely don't know and am curious.)

      • a day ago ago
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    • smrtinsert a day ago ago

      We're keeping an unofficial allow list at work. Basically just major software companies only. Third party mcp servers at this point are basically just attack vectors. How do you even vet them continuously?

      Honestly vetting MCP seems like a YC company in and of itself.

      • mikestorrent 18 hours ago ago

        Yeah, we face this issue as well. Folks are super keen to just download code from random people's githubs and run it with their credentials and grant it access to contexts that have all kinds of abilities to cause damage if there was ever a supply chain attack.

      • wirehack a day ago ago

        We build our MCP servers ourselves and many of them are open source. You can check out our github repo.

  • darkbatman a day ago ago

    We kinda use https://github.com/googleapis/genai-toolbox but for databases looking forward if klavis provide more or general solution.

    Ideally when we are writing agents we need mcp to support auth, custom headers because by design when deploying for saas we need to pass around client params to be able to isolate client connections.

    We do token optimisation and other smart stuff to save token money. Looking forward to try this as well if this solves similar problems as well

  • CuriouslyC a day ago ago

    This is something I actually started to work on and put down because it wasn't exciting enough, but it's a legit product that fills a niche and congrats on the launch.

    The biggest issue I found was getting agents to intelligently navigate the choose your own adventure of searching for the right tool. It amazes me that they're so good at coding when they're so bad at tool use in general. I'm sure your MCP responses were a fun bit of prompt engineering.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Haha yeah we did optimize it a lot before the launch!

      Actually for us, our first prototype was pretty good! We are also surprised about that because it took us a day or so to build the the prototype (only for one integrations though). Then it took us another week to build another prototype for multiple integrations.

  • tleyden5iwx a day ago ago

    Looks really useful! Do you happen to have a gallery of apps using it? In particular, I'd like to see how desktop or mobile apps handle the oauth flows.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Yes we do! Just signup to our website https://www.klavis.ai/home/mcp-servers and you will see all the apps and the auth options.

      • Banditoz a day ago ago

        I think having the gallery viewable without an account would be valuable.

        • wirehack a day ago ago

          Oh yes for sure. Checkout https://www.klavis.ai/mcp-servers. You do not need to sign up. But you cannot see the auth flow for obvious reasons.

          • a day ago ago
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          • p_ing a day ago ago

            The lack of enterprise Microsoft services is really discouraging.

            • wirehack a day ago ago

              We are aware of this and working on it now. We are actually code complete on Microsoft Teams and Outlook. We will definitely launch it within the next week or so.

  • wanderingbit a day ago ago

    Heads up, your docs for “Getting Started > Multi-app integration > open source” point to a broken link for the open source code:

    https://docs.klavis.ai/documentation/quickstart#open-source

    Add a call to the mintlify cli ‘mint broken-links’ into your CI and you should be set!

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Thank you! I did not know this trick! I am fixing this now.

  • ssgodderidge a day ago ago

    Is the goal to make a “universal MCP” that makes it easy to let MCP clients execute thousands of tools on a session by session basis? Or is it more focused on initial tool discovery and registration? If it’s the former, does the process add more latency between user taking action and tool getting executed?

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Yes it is the former. The value comes from its progressive guidance during a task, not just in the initial setup.

      As for latency, we optimized for that. For examples, Strata automatically uses a direct, flat approach for simple cases. And we use less tokens compared to official MCP servers as well, as shown in the benchmark.

      • typpilol a day ago ago

        Isn't Microsoft going to eat your lunch with their "virtual tools" offering for high tool counts?

        • wirehack a day ago ago

          We tested our approaches with several thousand tools and it is working pretty well. Also we provide API access as well, so any developer can use this, not just on Microsoft or VS Code.

  • justchad a day ago ago

    This looks very relevant and useful to what I'm working on at the moment. The LLM gets lost in all of the tools we provide for certain actions.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      Glad it could be helpful to you! Curious what AI agents you are building and exactly what tools caused the failure.

      In any case, feel free to give us a try!

  • saberience 8 hours ago ago

    This is a solution seeking a problem. Why would we want a single reliable agent to have access to 1000s of tools? When would this ACTUALLY be valuable or useful.

    What IS useful and offers value is having an agent which accesses 1 or 2 tools but always uses those tools accurately and correctly 99.9+% of the time.

    I've seen tons of MCP companies who are offering 1000s of wrapped HTTP APIs as MCP tools, which is note very easy to implement, but in reality, it's totally fucking useless for enterprise use-cases which need to work reliably, in a secure, repeatable fashion.

    Any chump can rig an MCP client to 20 tools, but then watch your agent fail again and again and again.

    Basically, this is a bad idea for a business and I'd personally suggest pivoting to something that focuses on ensuring a single agent works reliably, provides guardrails, evaluation, security etc. This is the real challenge to solve.

    • klauslin666 7 hours ago ago

      I'd say the value of Strata is more than just one MCP Server, it's a strategy that can apply on AI Agent interacting with tools or even other AI agents.

      in your example, one agent access 1~2 tools, what if an enterprise have 1000 use cases and need 1000 AI agents as you said. How you let your system intelligently dispatch the correct AI agent to the correct use case? (or will OpenAI create 1000 customGPT and let user to choose which one? ) instead you need a way to intelligently dispatch user query to different sub-tools or sub-agent, depends on how you design. But the essence of Strata I believe is rely on model's reasoning to minimize context window + maximizer relevant info. and then solve the user query.

      Security is another level of topic and I think it's not related to this approach.

  • carloscheddar a day ago ago

    "One MCP server for AI to handle thousands of tools" I wonder if they intended to refer the Tron movie where the Master Control Program(MCP) handles thousands of programs.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      No this is pure coincidence lol.

  • koliber a day ago ago

    How do you handle compliance questionnaires from companies that adhere to SOC2 guidelines? If I used Klavis how would I tell my clients which information I send to which external partners?

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      We are SOC2 compliant. So this will not be a problem. Come talk to us if you are interested in using this for your clients and we can work out the details.

  • adv0r a day ago ago

    I always dreamed of a bidding protocol for tools...

  • bigolnik a day ago ago

    How does this differ from something like nexusrouter?

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      As you can see from our examples, the main approach is not tool search. Instead, Strata guides your AI agent step by step, going from server to categories to actions to action details so that the model does not get overloaded. We actually have 1000+ tools for some of the integrations (e.g. GitHub) and this approach works better than traditional methods.

      Think of it as a search engine vs. a file explorer. But we do provide documentation search as well. So you get the best out of the two worlds.

  • jfdi a day ago ago

    Nice work this definitely feels like a market gap, for those who’ve been deep enough to experience it.

  • alooPotato a day ago ago

    Can services dd to your supported list of MCP servers? Or do you write all the servers?

  • a day ago ago
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  • nextworddev a day ago ago

    As an investor, I’m hesistant to invest in mcp infra startups

  • rooftopzen a day ago ago

    Dove deep into this - 25+ security issues; no thx

  • typpilol a day ago ago

    Comparing to the official GitHub server isn't a good benchmark because it's a bloated mess of tools still.

    • wirehack a day ago ago

      The eval benchmark also compared Notion and we are 13% higher than them as well!

  • Daniel160791 a day ago ago

    [dead]