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Comment by simonw

4 hours ago

I heard a neat tip recently about API design for agents: give them a way to send you feedback.

The example I heard was an MCP with a "feedback" tool which had a tool description saying that coding agents should call that any time they had trouble figuring out how to use the rest of the MCP.

I really like this. It's super cheap to implement and I expect you'd get a bunch of actionable signal in amongst the noise.

Yeah i have a similar setup at the harness level - a “devlog” at the end of every session about the experience developing, what could have been better, what was confusing

And also files issues for blockers

I’ve absolutely caught things and made improvements just from skimming them occasionally - they are particularly useful when you get a PR that makes you scratch your head

But I’m definitely not taking full advantage of all the feedback coming in yet

I have to imagine parsing signal from noise there is a massive challenge when it’s other agents that are using your MCP and not just your own

One strategy I like for this is a notes field on every single MCP route. Lets the AI optionally just decide to tell you things.

a feedback tool idea is good (mintlify landed on smth similar) but it's just the starting point. what we found is feedback < support. agents love resolution because anything less is still a blocker in their workflow. and it can't be MCP specific because your curl and CLI users need the same surface.