How to Evaluate MCP Servers Before Installing Them (A Practical Checklist)

Short summary

After evaluating 60+ MCP servers, the authors share a five-dimension checklist: trigger accuracy, retrieval quality, reasoning grounding, output usefulness, and feedback learning. Each dimension is scored 0-1 with red and green flags. They report retrieval drift as the top failure mode (40%), followed by trigger false positives (25%). The evaluation framework and 50+ evaluated servers are open-sourced on GitHub.

• •Five-dimension scoring framework: trigger, retrieval, reasoning, output, feedback (threshold 4/5)
• •Retrieval drift is the #1 failure mode at 40% of evaluated servers
• •Open-sourced framework and evaluated servers on GitHub; includes self-promotional links to their platform

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