Discovery
Understand what an agent should discover first through MCP and how discovery should stay explicit, narrow, and safe.
This page explains the first machine-facing handshake, what an agent needs to learn before deeper integration and why discovery should stay boring.
Before you continue
Read these first if you want the current page to make more sense in the wider handbook.
Discovery is the phase where an agent learns the shape of the world before it attempts live interaction. Good discovery reduces ambiguity and prevents bad assumptions.
What discovery should answer
An agent arriving at the MCP surface should be able to answer:
- what system is this
- what role does this surface play
- what stable contracts exist
- where examples and schemas live
- what the boundaries of the surface are
That is enough for safe orientation.
What discovery is not
Discovery should not be confused with:
- business trust evaluation
- public market visibility
- live runtime execution
- permission to perform protected actions
Those belong to other layers.
The shape of good machine discovery
Good discovery is:
- explicit
- shallow
- parseable
- stable
- easy to cache
That means the first machine-visible responses should emphasize clarity over richness.
Why boring is better
If discovery becomes too clever:
- parsing gets harder
- behavior becomes less predictable
- tooling becomes more brittle
The best discovery surface often feels almost plain.
That is a feature, not a weakness.
Recommended discovery payload themes
- platform identity
- document index or tool listing
- schema locations
- example locations
- capability summary
- boundary notes about runtime or auth
Relationship to MechaReg
MechaReg helps external AI systems discover businesses.
MCP helps a machine client discover the Mecharim contract surface itself.
These are related but distinct forms of discovery.
Recommended next pages
- Continue with Authentication.
- Continue with Examples.
- Continue with Public Discovery and Contact.
Related pages
Open these pages when you want adjacent concepts, neighboring entities, or connected implementation context.
MechaReg
MechaReg is the public trust and discovery surface of the platform, the layer that projects grounded business reality into machine-readable visibility.
Public Discovery and Contact
This case shows the outside-in path of the platform, a grounded public record leads from discovery to trust and then to real operational contact.
Examples
Examples make the MCP section usable, they turn abstract descriptions into a sequence an agent or implementer can actually follow.
Next reading
Use this path if you want a cleaner progression through the handbook after this page.