When you buy a new lamp, you plug it into the wall. You do not call an electrician, you do not open the walls, and you do not rewire the house. The socket was built once, and everything you own just works with it.
Now look at how most people add one MCP tool to their AI agents. Claude Desktop needs claude_desktop_config.json. Claude Code wants .claude.json. Cursor reads .cursor/mcp.json. Cline and Windsurf have their own shapes too. One new tool means four edits, four restarts, and four chances to get a path or an environment variable wrong. We rewire the house for every lamp, and we act like that is normal.
mcptoon takes the power strip approach instead. One config file, one command, and every agent on your machine shares the same set of tools. This week it got a new hero image on GitHub showing exactly that: plug your MCP tools in once, and Claude, Cursor, Codex or any agent can use them. No config, no restarts.
Three steps, any OS, no configuration
The whole onboarding now fits in three commands.
# 1 · install
pip install mcptoon
# 2 · plug in — auto-discovers tools you already configured
mcptoon quickstart
# 3 · see it work on your own machine — no trust required
mcptoon demo
pip install mcptoon pulls about 250KB of pure Python standard library. Zero dependencies, which means the supply chain you are installing is readable and small. quickstart scans the agents you already set up and lists every tool it finds, so nothing needs to be re-entered. sync then writes native config into each agent it detects, merging instead of overwriting, so your hand-tuned servers stay untouched.
Step 3 is the one I care about most. mcptoon demo runs a live comparison on your own machine: the tool list as raw JSON next to the compressed name index, with real token counts from your actual servers. No screenshots, no numbers you have to take on faith. Watch the list shrink, then decide. If it does not impress you, uninstall and you have lost two minutes.
What changed this week under the hood
Version 0.7.0 landed with full support for the newest MCP spec (2026-07-28), and the details matter for anyone running servers across flaky laptops and long sessions.
Stateless auto-negotiation means mcptoon figures out what a server speaks on first contact and adapts, including probing with server/discover for servers on the new spec while staying fully compatible with older ones. Structured tool output is parsed natively instead of dumped as text.
The interesting part is MRTR, multi round-trip. Some tools need several exchanges to finish one job. mcptoon 0.7.0 adds a --request-state flag, and the retry hint carries a state token, so a tool call that gets interrupted by a restart or a reconnect can resume where it stopped instead of starting over. If you have ever lost a ten-minute tool result because your laptop went to sleep, that is the fix.
The README now also carries an MCP Registry ownership marker (io.github.activeing123/mcptoon), so registry entries can verify who actually owns the package. Small thing, but it is the kind of provenance hygiene a healthy ecosystem needs. The test suite is at 569 and green in CI.
The honest limits
No tool is magic, and the README says so out loud.
The compact manifest is names only. It tells your agent what exists, not every parameter detail, and full JSON stays one flag away when a call needs exactness. Token counts vary by tokenizer, so expect 10 to 25 percent difference between what mcptoon reports and what your provider bills. Cold starts on stdio servers cost roughly 300ms each, which is the price of running programs instead of a persistent process. And there is no GUI. This is a command line tool for people comfortable in a terminal.
I find that honesty refreshing in a week where every other repo promises to 10x your agent. It saves 99.8 percent of the tool-listing tokens on a 50-server, 255-tool setup, and it tells you exactly where the edges of that claim are.
Try the power strip
pip install mcptoon
mcptoon quickstart
mcptoon demo
Windows, macOS, Linux. Apache 2.0, free forever. Repo with the new power strip art and full spec compatibility notes: https://github.com/activeing123/mcptoon
Stop rewiring the house. Buy the strip, plug in your tools, and let every agent you own use them.
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