3 posts tagged with "mcp"

Six plugins. One feature. That math never made sense.

Constellation ships a plugin for Claude Code. And one for Codex. And Copilot, Cursor, Antigravity, and OpenCode. Every one of them delivers the same thing: our MCP server plus a handful of skills that teach the agent when to reach for code intelligence. Six repositories, six manifest formats, six sets of installation docs, six release pipelines. The content is identical. The packaging never was.

So when the Agent Plugins specification hit 1.0.0, an open, vendor-neutral standard for packaging exactly this kind of thing, we didn't just take notice. We celebrated. This post is about why the spec matters, what it actually standardizes, where it still has gaps, and what we built with it.

Same model. Same tasks. Same codebase. One tool that already knows the structure.

We've written about why structural code intelligence matters, how Code Mode makes MCP queries more efficient, and the case for a shared code intelligence layer across your team. What we hadn't published yet was the metrics. The actual difference, in tokens and dollars, between an AI agent navigating a codebase with Constellation versus without it.

That changes today. Our Q2 2026 benchmark results are out, and the data is cleaner than we expected.

What if, instead of giving your AI agent a menu of tools to pick from, you gave it an SDK and let it write code?

In our last post on context engineering, we talked about why every token in an LLM's context window needs to earn its spot. We explored how structural code intelligence beats text search, and how purpose-built MCP tools give AI agents a real understanding of your codebase instead of a pile of grep results.

But we glossed over something important: how those MCP tools are delivered to the agent matters just as much as what they do. And the standard approach to MCP tool calling has some fundamental scaling problems.

This post is about how we solved them. It's about Code Mode, a pattern that replaces traditional MCP tool calling with something far more powerful, and why we adopted it as the foundation of Constellation's MCP server.