Show HN: Marmot, context layer for agents and humans(marmotdata.io)
14 pointsby bschaatsbergen4 hours ago2 comments
  • kerlentonan hour ago
    The catalog approach is appropriate for MCP as well. Something I would be interested in: once you have all of your services/APIs/DBs exposed via one MCP server, the next choke point will become the model of selecting the correct tool. After the first dozens of tools, agents select the wrong tool (or nothing) more often than it would be expected.

    How does Marmot cope with it? Are all of the tools exposed in a flat way, or there is a scoping/search step which allows an agent to select between only a few tools out of the catalog?

    • charlie-haleyan hour ago
      Hey, good question. Marmot is designed to be as generic as possible. An "Asset", whether it's a database, glossary term, topic, API or anything else, has the exact same schema, API endpoint and MCP tool. The MCP server exposes 3 tools: discover_data, find_ownership and lookup_term. Scoping happens as filters and arguments to discover_data, and it's summary-first, so a broad query returns counts or provider breakdowns rather than dumping every asset into context, and the agent narrows from there. The search step is really the primary interface here.
      • kerlenton44 minutes ago
        Makes sense. 3 generic tools + summarize first is a nice approach to sidestepping the problem of too many tools. But it looks like it shifts the chokepoint around rather than eliminating it: instead of "choose the proper tool out of many", it shifts to "formulate the appropriate query to discover_data from the summary".

        But in real applications, does the model reliably drill down from the general summary, or does it often just hang around at the level of the summary?

  • bonigv4 hours ago
    Bruno, if we are operating the agent (assuming coding-agent ) in an environment where the build and test tools as well the source code lives, why would we need an additional step to supply context? Wouldn't even the most basic of agents eb able to operate on those tools and build the discovery themselves?