mcp-semantic-gateway 0.1.1

Semantic Tool Discovery Middleware for MCP

MCP Semantic Gateway: Semantic Discovery Middleware for MCP 🦞

Stop Bloating Your Agent's Context. Start Scaling Your Toolsets.

MCP Semantic Gateway is an open-source, local-first middleware for the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It solves the "Too Many Tools" problem by semantically filtering your tool registry, prompts, and skills on-the-fly, ensuring your LLM stays focused, accurate, and cost-efficient.

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🚀 Part 1: Quick Start

What is it?

If you have 30+ MCP tools, your agent's context window is saturated with JSON definitions before it even starts thinking. This leads to hallucinations, high token costs, and declining accuracy. MCP Semantic Gateway sits as a proxy between your client (Claude Code, Cursor) and your servers, serving only the tools relevant to your current task.

Installation

# Clone the repository
gh repo clone codeninja/mcp-semantic-gateway
cd mcp-semantic-gateway

# Install dependencies and initialize
uv sync
uv run mcp-semantic-gateway init

1. Configure Your Sources

Add your MCP servers or OpenAPI specs to ~/.mcp_semantic_gateway/config.toml:

[servers.github]
type = "mcp"
command = "npx"
args = ["@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"]

[servers.weather-api]
type = "openapi"
url = "https://api.weather.gov/openapi.json"

2. Build the Semantic Index

MCP Semantic Gateway embeds your tool descriptions locally using all-MiniLM-L6-v2.

uv run mcp-semantic-gateway index

3. Connect Your Agent

Point your client to the MCP Semantic Gateway Proxy. For Claude Desktop:

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp_semantic_gateway": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": ["--directory", "/path/to/mcp-semantic-gateway", "run", "mcp-semantic-gateway", "proxy"]
  }
}

4. Use It

Simply tell your agent what you're doing. The agent will call mcp_semantic_gateway_context("debugging kubernetes logs"), and MCP Semantic Gateway will instantly activate the relevant tools in the agent's registry.

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🧠 Part 2: Technical Architecture

MCP Semantic Gateway operates as a Statistical Filtering Proxy. It doesn't just forward requests; it transforms the environment based on intent.

How it Works:

1. Ingestion: The Collector harvests tools from native MCP servers, "forges" new tools from OpenAPI/Swagger docs, and indexes local Agent Skills (SKILL.md).
2. Semantic Index: A local SQLite + hnswlib vector store maintains embeddings for every tool, prompt, and skill.
3. The Discovery Loop:
   • The Agent sets a context via mcp_semantic_gateway_context.
   • MCP Semantic Gateway intercepts the next tools/list or prompts/list request.
   • It performs a sub-millisecond k-NN search and returns only the top-k matches.
   • tools/call requests are transparently routed back to the correct upstream server.

Deep Dive: For a full breakdown of the layered architecture, domain models, and state machines, see our Full Technical Specification.

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🤝 Part 3: Contributing

We are building the "Garbage Collector for the Context Window," and we want your help!

How to Contribute

• Create a Bridge: Have a niche API? Add an example to /examples showing how to bridge it.
• Improve the Forge: Help us refine the OpenAPI-to-MCP transformation logic.
• New Backends: We want to support more vector stores (Chroma, pgvector) and remote embedding providers.
• Feedback: Open an issue if you find a tool-selection hallucination we can't solve.

Development Workflow

1. Fork the repo.
2. Create a feature branch: feat/issue-number-description.
3. Run the E2E suite: uv run pytest tests/test_e2e.py.
4. Submit a PR!

Community

Join Dallas and the team in the OpenClaw Discord to discuss the future of agentic infrastructure.

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Built by codeninja and the OpenClaw Agentic Dev Team.