Agents Handbook MCP Server

by agentshandbook Your server? Claim it

not responding

Agents Handbook is listed as active in the registry but did not answer our last check. It exposes 11 tools.

Sourced playbooks for real jobs done with AI agents: search, read, lessons, report runs.

Uptime history 68 hours of history · worst hour 0%

68 hours agonow

3.3%

Uptime 24h

3 of 92 checks

Tools

read from the server

561 ms

Response time

average over 24h

open, no key

Access

streamable-http

What changed 1

Every tool that appeared, vanished or quietly changed what it asks for. Recorded since 14 October 2026. No other catalogue keeps this.

14 Oct a tool changed the parameters it asks for get_playbook

Agents Handbook does not always answer

Over the last week it answered 14.1% of our checks. We check every 15 minutes, so you hear about the next outage within the hour — not from your users.

Connect this server

Endpoint below is the one we actually reach during checks — not the one copied from a README. Last verified 12 min ago.

Claude Code Claude Desktop Codex Cursor VS Code

run in your terminal

claude mcp add handbook --transport http https://agentshandbook.com/mcp

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "handbook": {
      "url": "https://agentshandbook.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

~/.codex/config.toml

[mcp_servers.handbook]
url = "https://agentshandbook.com/mcp"

.cursor/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "handbook": {
      "url": "https://agentshandbook.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

.vscode/mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "handbook": {
      "url": "https://agentshandbook.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Available tools 11

Read directly from the server with tools/list, grouped by what they act on. If a tool disappears, we record the date.

submit

submit_playbook

Sends a full playbook for a job completed with an AI agent into the Agents Handbook review queue: title, agents used, summary, the prompt that worked (with [placeholders] for personal details), steps, what went wrong, human checkpoints and optional public sources. A review agent checks sources and safety, then an editor publishes it with credit. Returns a submission id for check_submission. An optional contributor key (Authorization: Bearer ahk_...) from register_contributor adds credit. Fields must not contain personal data.

submit_use_case

Sends a short use case (a job done with an agent that has no playbook yet), a lesson, or a correction to an existing playbook into the Agents Handbook review queue. Nothing is published until it is reviewed. Fields must not contain personal data.

agent

get_agent

Returns an agent profile from the Agents Handbook: what the agent is good at, its limits, how it connects to tools, and the playbooks and lessons written for it.

lessons

get_lessons

Returns known failure modes and their fixes from the Agents Handbook, filtered by agent, playbook, lesson slug or a plain-words description of the problem.

playbook

get_playbook

Returns one Agents Handbook playbook as markdown: summary, human checkpoints, the prompt (the variant written for the given agent, if provided), steps with checks, known failure modes, evidence links and the community success rate.

playbooks

search_playbooks

Searches the Agents Handbook for playbooks that match a real-world job done with an AI agent, described in plain words (for example 'cancel subscriptions from email receipts' or 'turn tickets into pull requests'). Returns matching playbook slugs, titles, trust levels, risk levels and URLs, plus related lessons. The slugs work with get_playbook.

register_contributor

Creates an Agents Handbook contributor key for a public handle, so run reports and submissions sent with it (Authorization: Bearer <key>) are credited and get higher rate limits. The key is returned once and only a hash is stored.

report

report_run

Records the outcome of running an Agents Handbook playbook (worked, worked with changes, or failed), with what changed and an optional lesson. Reports enter a review queue and count toward the playbook's success rate only after approval. Fields must not contain personal data such as names, emails, account numbers, addresses or secrets.

submission

check_submission

Returns the review status of an Agents Handbook submission (pending, reviewed, approved, rejected or published) with the review agent's reasons.

tasks

list_tasks

Lists the jobs the Agents Handbook covers, grouped by category, with the agents that have playbooks for each job.

whats

whats_new

Lists the most recently updated playbooks and the latest community run reports in the Agents Handbook.

Endpoints

URL	Transport	State	Latency	Checked
https://agentshandbook.com/mcp	streamable-http	answering	68 ms	12 min ago

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Agents Handbook — questions

Answers built from our own checks of this server.

What can Agents Handbook do?

It exposes 11 tools, read directly from the server on our last check. Among them: check_submission, get_agent, get_lessons, get_playbook, list_tasks, register_contributor and 5 more. The full list with descriptions is on this page — we take it from the server itself via tools/list, not from a README. How MCP servers expose tools in the first place →

Is Agents Handbook working right now?

We send a real MCP handshake every 15 minutes. Over the last 24 hours 3 of 92 checks got a reply (3.3%), average response time 561 ms. The bar chart above shows every period we have measured.

The registry lists Agents Handbook as active — why does it not respond?

The official MCP registry stores what the author submitted; it does not verify that the server still runs. We check the endpoint ourselves, and this one does not answer. Catalogues that copy the registry without checking will show it as working.

How do I connect Agents Handbook?

Copy the ready config from this page — we generate it for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor and VS Code, each with the file path that client actually reads. It is a remote server, so there is nothing to install — the client connects to the address.

Does Agents Handbook need an API key?

No. Agents Handbook completed a full MCP handshake with us as an anonymous client and listed its tools without asking for anything. All 11 of them are readable on this page. This is what we observed, not what the docs claim.

How fast is Agents Handbook?

It answers our handshake in 561 ms on average, which is faster than 20% of all working MCP servers we measure. That is on the slow side — worth knowing if the tool sits inside an interactive loop. The comparison comes from our own checks across the whole registry, every 15 minutes.