MCP Tip: One-Line Instructions Beat Long Tool Descriptions, 18/20 vs 3/10 in Evals

colinmcnamara · x · 2026-10-23

At an Austin LangChain meetup, Jeff Linwood showed an agent eval for his MCP task tracker: a single short instruction got agents to adopt the tool in 18 of 20 runs, while long tool descriptions achieved 3/10 or less.

Takeaway for anyone shipping MCP tools: write the one line instead of verbose descriptions.

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