Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-09-01
Deciders: kit maintainers

0004. Thin bootstrap, kit-knowledge chunks, and one MCP profile per session

Context and Problem Statement

Dumping philosophy, SOPs, skill bodies, and a stacked MCP catalog into every turn burns the context budget and makes EDD routing evals meaningless. Agents still need kit procedures and live tools. We needed a lasting split: what is always-on versus retrieved, and how many MCP servers compete for tool-schema tokens.

Decision Drivers

Keep always-on bootstrap under ~2k tokens (kit measure-context)
Retrieve SOP / philosophy / handover slices instead of bulk file reads
Extra MCP tools compete for attention and inflate schemas
EDD (ADR 0003) only stays honest if always-on context stays thin

Considered Options

Option A: Eager-load CODING_PHILOSOPHY.md, SOPs, and stacked MCP profiles in every session
Option B: Thin AGENTS.md index; on-demand file read / kit-knowledge chunks; one MCP profile per session
Option C: No MCP; agents always Read whole kit files

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: "Option B", because invariants live in the thin handshake, procedure text is a retrieval problem, and profile composition is a session-scoped adapter choice. SOP: SOPs/context-budget.md. Catalog: mcps/README.md.

Consequences

Good, because default sessions stay lean (kit-knowledge, context7, github, memory) and skills declare mcp: ids
Bad, because agents must look up procedures instead of having full SOP text in every prompt
Follow-up: do not stack collab + devtools + ops into one global mcp.json