The MCP Tool That Timed Out at Five Seconds
We expose our internal knowledge base over both REST and MCP using fastapi-mcp, which mounts existing FastAPI routes as MCP tools: no second server, no protocol-translation proxy. Two tools matter here: search_kb (semantic retrieval) and ask_kb (retrieval plus an LLM synthesis call that returns a cited answer). search_kb worked flawlessly everywhere. ask_kb failed, intermittently, and the failure was maddeningly opaque. In the MCP client it surfaced as nothing more than: Command failed with no output No stack trace. No error payload. Just silence. And only sometimes. ...