RAG Tool Agent — MCP Server

Exposes the two tools behind the rag-tool-agent-demo project (retrieval-grounded Q&A over FordA dataset notes, and a safe arithmetic calculator) as a proper Model Context Protocol server, so any MCP-compatible client — Claude Desktop, an MCP-aware agent harness, or a custom host — can call them directly instead of only through that project's own CLI or through the Flask HTTP wrapper in rag-tool-api-docker.

Built to close a specific, named gap: several current AI-engineer/agentic application postings explicitly ask for hands-on experience with MCP (and related agent-to-agent/agent-to-UI protocols). This is a small, real, tested implementation, not a claim of protocol experience without evidence behind it.

Why it's structured this way

The original agent does its own routing internally — a hand-rolled if/else that decides "calculator" vs. "retrieval" vs. "direct answer" for each incoming question. MCP inverts that: the client (the LLM/agent host) does the routing, by reading each tool's name, description, and JSON-schema parameters and deciding which one to call. So this server doesn't reimplement the original routing logic — it exposes the two underlying capabilities as standalone, independently-callable MCP tools and lets any MCP client route to them itself. That's the actual point of the protocol: tools become host-agnostic instead of hardwired into one agent's dispatch logic.

• search_notes(query: str) -> str — retrieval-style lookup over a small inlined notes corpus about the FordA dataset, returned with the same [Grounded in N retrieved chunk(s) from ...] provenance suffix the original agent uses, so a client can tell a grounded answer from an ungrounded one. Uses a small keyword-overlap ranker rather than re-deriving the original project's FAISS/embeddings index — the point of this project is the MCP exposure layer, not duplicating that work.

• calculate(expression: str) -> str — arithmetic tool, restricted to + - * / () and numeric literals via an ast-based safe evaluator (not a bare eval() on arbitrary input). Verified to reject both non-arithmetic input and injection attempts like __import__('os').system(...).

• Built with the official mcp Python SDK (FastMCP), the same SDK Anthropic publishes for building MCP servers.

Related MCP server: NotebookLM MCP Server

Running it

pip install -r requirements.txt
python server.py

Runs over stdio — the standard local transport MCP clients like Claude Desktop use to launch and talk to a server as a subprocess. To point Claude Desktop at it, add to its MCP server config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rag-tool-agent": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Running the tests

pytest tests/ -v

11 tests, all passing — call the tool functions directly (no MCP transport needed for unit-level coverage of the tool logic itself): grounded retrieval answers, the grounding-count contract, arithmetic correctness (including a division example matching the original agent's own documented example), rejection of non-arithmetic and injection input, division-by-zero handling, and tool self-registration with descriptions.

Verified as a real MCP server, not just as functions

Beyond the unit tests, this was verified end-to-end using the real mcp client SDK (ClientSession + stdio_client) — spawning server.py as an actual subprocess, completing the MCP initialize handshake, calling list_tools(), and calling both tools over the real protocol:

TOOLS: ['search_notes', 'calculate']
calculate -> 1320 / (3601 + 1320) = 0.2682381629750051
search_notes -> The FordA dataset is a univariate time-series
  classification dataset... [Grounded in 3 retrieved chunk(s) from
  forda_dataset_notes.md]
calculate(injection) -> Error: could not evaluate "__import__('os')" ...

That confirms the server speaks real MCP (handshake, tool discovery, tool invocation) and not just that the underlying Python functions work in isolation.

Relationship to the other two projects

• rag-tool-agent-demo — the original CLI agent: LangChain, FAISS, Ollama, LCEL retrieval chain, calculator tool, LLM-driven routing.

• rag-tool-api-docker — that agent wrapped as a Flask HTTP API, containerized (Docker, multi-stage build, non-root user, health check), verified with real HTTP requests against a running container.

• This project — the same underlying capabilities (retrieval, calculator) exposed over MCP instead of HTTP, so they're callable by any MCP host rather than only by a REST client.