Open-source MCP proxy mcp-meta collapses 104 tools into two lazy-loaded meta-tools

On November 4, 2026 at 21:05 (Beijing time), a developer posted on V2EX announcing the open-source launch of mcp-meta, an MCP proxy hosted at https://github.com/monkey-sking/mcp-meta.

The motivation described in the post is that when a client is connected to multiple MCP Servers, every tool's full JSON Schema is injected into the context on each request, whether or not it will be used. The author's own test setup ran 14 Servers with 104 tools in total, and the schema alone consumed 142,000 characters before the model even read the prompt.

mcp-meta sits between the client and any number of upstream MCP Servers, exposing only two lazy-loaded meta-tools to the model: mcp_tools, which shows an overview of the upstream Servers or fetches a Server's tool list on demand via a compact signature such as search(query: string, [limit: integer]); and mcp_call, which issues a call to a target Server and tool by name. In the author's measurements, connecting through mcp-meta reduced the per-request schema to 892 characters, a 99.4 percent reduction, while preserving full call access to all 104 tools.

The project is implemented in pure Python 3.9+ standard library with no dependencies, and is released under the MIT license. The front-end uses stdio; the back-end supports both stdio and HTTP, with compatibility for SSE, session persistence, pagination, and automatic protocol downgrade, as well as filtering by Server. The project is currently at its open-source release stage, with the author inviting the community to try it out.