Skills
In a random draw of 400 MCP servers, only 48.8% complete a handshake, and 58.8% of tools omit safety annotations
From a 24,135-server registry census, a seeded draw of 400 npm/stdio servers showed that 37.5% never start at all, while missing credentials account for only 13.3%. Among the servers that run, schema conformance was perfect, but optional safety annotations were missing on 58.8% of tools, against 41.5% on a hand-curated set. The same study found that 68.8% of raw BFCL rows are exact name-plus-description repeats. Before adding a registry MCP server, smoke-test the initialize handshake and do not rely on its readOnly/destructive hints being present.
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