rag-mcp-tool-selection

rag-mcp-tool-selection is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills. It costs 132 tokens per session (2,354 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool-filtering method for agents that can access many MCP, cloud, or internal API tools. It searches tool descriptions and returns only the best matches for a user's request.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it before an AI request when a registry contains dozens of tools, to retrieve, check, and format a smaller relevant selection.
Why use it?
Listing every available tool can fill the agent's context with unnecessary text and make the right tool harder to choose.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it before an AI request when a registry contains dozens of tools, to retrieve, check, and format a smaller relevant selection.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills --skill rag-mcp-tool-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for rag-mcp-tool-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for rag-mcp-tool-selection

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthonyalcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills/rag-mcp-tool-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,354 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00132 $0.02354
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01177
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00471
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00235

Measured 11d ago against content hash c7a93ddd9a0d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rag-mcp-tool-selection scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (cli.py, lib.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/tool-orchestration/rag-mcp-tool-selection/SKILL.md · 174 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 174 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

RAG-MCP Tool Selection

Overview

The Model Context Protocol's tools/list operation returns every tool an agent has access to. At enterprise scale this consumes the context window before the agent has done any reasoning. The book's worked anchor is Block's Goose agent — 12,000 employees, 60+ MCP servers — where employees enabled every server "just in case" and tool descriptions ate the entire prompt budget.

The chapter cites measurable degradation from the RAG-MCP research:

Tools available Selection accuracy (baseline LLM)
10 Near-perfect
100 Begins to degrade
1,000 Below 40%

RAG-MCP replaces tools/list with a semantic search over tool metadata. Reported benchmarks: 50-70% prompt-token reduction, selection accuracy 13.62% → 43.13%, response time -60%. This skill is the smallest unit of that pattern — a function you can run before any LLM call to filter the tools you actually inject.

When to Use

Trigger contexts:

  • Building an MCP-based agent with 30+ tools exposed
  • A user asks the agent something that could match many tools, you want top-K
  • Migrating an existing single-shot prompt to MCP and the prompt is too big
  • Authoring a new tool registry — you want to verify each tool is findable

Phrases that should invoke this skill: "filter the tools", "which tools should the agent use", "the prompt is too big", "RAG-MCP", "tool selection", "reduce prompt bloat".

When NOT to Use

  • Under 10 tools. The book is explicit: with 10 tools the model achieves near-perfect selection. Filtering buys you nothing and adds latency.
  • Fixed-pipeline scripts where the tool sequence is hardcoded — no retrieval needed.
  • As a replacement for an MCP server. This skill picks WHICH tools an MCP server should expose for a query; it does not replace the server.
  • As a quality gate. Use the SkillNet five-dimension framework (Ch6) for skill-quality evaluation, not this skill.
  • For multi-tool workflow planning. This returns top-K tools by query similarity, not a dependency graph of tools. For collaborative-tool retrieval, see Baidu's COLT (Ch6) — out of scope here.

Read the full file on GitHub · 174 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 174 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A c7a93ddd9a0d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rag-mcp-tool-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository AnthonyAlcaraz/agentic-graph-rag-skills (10 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 2,354 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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