MCP Error Messages Written for Developers Hurt the Most Capable Agents Most

Abstract:Many Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers wrap web APIs built for human developers, and their error messages tell the reader to run a command, edit a configuration, open a web page or wait. Many agents that read them can only call the server's tools. In 150 widely used MCP servers, 949 of 3,001 error messages tell the caller what to do next, and half of these steps depend on something the server cannot see about the caller. On credential errors, 62 of 67 steps ask for a terminal command, a configuration change or a web page; on rate limits, 20 of 30 say to wait and retry without naming the call to repeat. We tested five OpenAI models that act only through the tools of Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard tasks, and the agents did what the step said. On expired credentials, a terminal command in the step left 45% of tasks recovered, and the loss it caused grew from 18 points for GPT-5.5 to 69 for GPT-6 Astra. On a rate limit, GitHub's "Wait before retrying." left 6%. We tested two remedies. For MCP developers, naming a server tool in the step raised recovery on expired credentials to 84%, with the login tool in place of the command, and on a rate limit to 88%, with the call to repeat in place of the bare wait. For agent developers, deleting the step with a one-sentence prompt before the model reads it raised recovery on expired credentials to 82%.

15 pages, 6 tables. Submitted to the Journal of Systems and Software. Data and code: this https URL

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.35381 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.35381v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.35381 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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