Can you be more specific? The simple case seems to be solved, eg if I have an mcp for foo enabled and then ask about a list of foo, Claude will go and call the list function on foo.
Not OP, but this is the part that I take issue with. I want to forget what tools are there and have the LLM figure out on its own which tool to use. Having to remember to add special words to encourage it to use specific tools (required a lot of the time, especially with esoteric tools) is annoying. I’m not saying this renders the whole thing “useless” because it’s good to have some idea of what you’re doing to guide the LLM anyway, but I wish it could do better here.
I've got a project that needs to run a special script and not just "make $target" at the command line in order to build, and with instructions in multiple . MD files, codex w/ gpt-5-high still forgets and runs make blindly which fails and it gets confused annoyingly often.
ooh, it does call make when I ask it to compile, and is able to call a couple other popular tools without having to refer to them by name. if I ask it to resize an image, it'll call imagemagik, or run ffmpeg and I don't need to refer to ffmpeg by name.
so at the end of the day, it seems they are their training data, so better write a popular blog post about your one-off MCP and the tools it exposes, and maybe the next version of the LLM will have your blog post in the training data and will automatically know how to use it without having to be told
It doesn't reliably do it. You need to inject context into the prompt to instruct the LLM to use tools/kb/etc. It isn't deterministic of when/if it will follow-through.