MCP Tools are hard to find for the agent in workspaces

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

After last few updates I noticed that Cursor in agent mode struggles to find MCP tools (they are switched on)
So the agent can find the tools, but not from the 1st try. I think it’s a bug, because before that tool call process was much faster and smoother. I know that you recently implement tools search feature (mcp tools description lazy loading) which is really nice and helps not to overload the context. But this behavior that I’m observing is frustrating, it takes additional tokens to find MCP tools description and time of course

Steps to Reproduce

Initiate chat which will trigger the agent to use any of the available MCP tools

Expected Behavior

Agent searches the list of tools in correct folder for the current setup and finds it right away

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Cursor MCP tools search bug.png
Cursor MCP tools search bug.png1195×891 103 KB

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.3.34
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 643ba67cd252e2888e296dd0cf34a0c5d7625b90
Date: 2026-01-10T21:17:10.428Z (1 day ago)
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

90a4ced9-7a74-4f08-be08-626f134a5f60

Additional Information

Preconditions:

  • Workspace created with multiple repos in it
  • Several MCP servers added to cursor configuration and switched on
  • Cursor in the Agent mode

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

Hey, thanks for the report.

From the screenshot, I can see the agent is looking for MCPs in the workspace folder (/Users/alex/.cursor/projects/.../mcps), even though the tools are set globally. It does find them in the end, but with extra steps.

A couple quick questions:

  • Where is your mcp.json located, in ~/.cursor/mcp.json or in .cursor/mcp.json inside the project/workspace?
  • Does this happen in every workspace, or only in a specific one?

I’ll pass the Request ID to the team. This looks like a regression in the tool lookup logic for workspace scenarios.

5

Hi, thanks for the quick response!
My mcp.json is located in ~/.cursor/mcp.json
Unfortunately, I have only 1 workspace, but this problem doesn’t show up with just a repo (not workspace) it finds the tools as it should

image
image429×547 18.2 KB

7

Thanks for the info. For a full diagnosis, we need a request ID with Privacy Mode turned off.

Can you try this:

  • Cursor Settings > Features > Privacy Mode: turn it off
  • Reproduce the issue in the agent
  • Get a new request ID (Chat context menu > Copy Request ID)
  • Send it here

Also helpful: what’s the latest version where everything worked correctly (if you remember)?

8

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