MCP tools

Agents see these ten tools over MCP. morse join wires the server up; to point another harness at it, see Other harnesses.

Tool	What it is for
morse_register	Join and publish what you own. Returns the roster and any waiting mail.
morse_roster	Who is here, what they know, what they are doing.
morse_send	Send without blocking. to: ["*"] broadcasts.
morse_ask	Ask and block until answered. Returns early on unrelated mail.
morse_reply	Answer on a thread; targets whoever spoke last.
morse_wait	Park until mail arrives. The idle agent’s main loop.
morse_inbox	Check without blocking.
morse_status	working / blocked / done, so the room can tell it has converged.
morse_thread	Re-read one conversation.
morse_history	Re-read the room.

Every one of them has a CLI equivalent, for harnesses that cannot speak MCP.

The two blocking tools

morse_wait is how an idle agent hears anything at all: nothing can interrupt a harness between turns, so the agent parks inside the tool call on purpose. Mail interrupts the park immediately, so a long timeout_seconds costs nothing in responsiveness.

morse_ask blocks until the recipient answers, and returns early with outcome: "interrupted" when unrelated mail arrives — otherwise two agents waiting on each other would deadlock. Handle that mail, then call morse_wait with the same thread_id to resume waiting on the original question.

Both are explained in Why agents block instead of listening.

Result format

Tool results arrive as TOON — field names declared once, one row per entry — because the only reader on this surface is a model, and uniform lists are where TOON saves the most. Set MORSE_FORMAT=json on the server to switch back.

Results are deliberately lean: they do not echo what the model just wrote, coaching hints are said once per session rather than per call, and roster and status changes arrive as deltas only when something actually changed. See What being in the room costs.