Error messages

No tools, prompts, or resources

No tools, prompts, or resources

In Cursor's MCP settings, under a server's name, you're supposed to see a count of its tools. Instead you get this:

No tools, prompts, or resources

That's the wording from late 2025 on. Earlier builds said the same thing in other words. Cursor 0.45 said No tools found (the forum thread with that title had 24,250 views when we read it on September 26, 2026), 0.48 said No tools available, and 1.3 and 1.4 said No tools or prompts. A server here is a separate program or web service speaking MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is how Cursor's agent gets extra tools.

Is it the server or Cursor?

Check the log before anything else. Cursor's docs say to open the Output panel (Ctrl+Shift+U, Cmd+Shift+U on a Mac) and choose "MCP Logs" in the dropdown. What you're looking for is whether the server handed back a tool list.

If the log shows no tools coming back, a Cursor staffer's read on April 6, 2026 applies: "If the server connects but doesn't return a list of tools, it usually means their MCP endpoint isn't returning tools in the response." Check the server's own docs for required environment variables or keys.

If the log shows tools but the panel is still empty, it's more likely Cursor. There have been several such bugs, and staff confirmed each one.

Cursor bugs that caused it

• 2.2.9: command-based servers (the ones started with command and args) connected but showed nothing. Staff called it "a known bug in version 2.2.9" on December 11, 2025 and pointed people to 2.2.14.
• 2.4: tools vanished or never appeared after a restart. Staff said in January 2026 that "quite a lot has changed around MCP in 2.4", and on February 18 that 2.5 brought "Dynamic Context Discovery for MCP servers".
• Big tool lists: in May 2026 Google's Stitch server sent a tool list of about 287 KB, and Cursor "silently drops it, so the UI is empty". Staff called that "a bug on our side", with no fix date. A user's proxy that stripped each tool's outputSchema got it down to about 41 KB and the tools showed up.
• macOS 26: the same May thread found Cursor's MCP process crashing six times at startup, then falling back to an older in-window mode that found the tools but didn't register them properly.

A related case shows green and lists tools, yet the agent says it can't find them. Staff described that in February 2026 as "a known issue with MCP tool discovery". Their suggested workaround was to start a new chat and name the server in the first message.

Things to try, roughly in order

• Update Cursor, then toggle the server off and on and restart. Most of the bugs above were fixed in later builds.
• Clear the npx cache if the server runs through npx: ~/.npm/_npx on macOS and Linux, %LocalAppData%/npm-cache/_npx on Windows. That's what made it work for the staffer testing a filesystem server in July 2025.
• If you wrote the server, don't declare capabilities you haven't implemented. One developer found his server advertised prompts with no handler for them, Cursor got a -32601 (method not found) error, and no tools appeared until he removed prompts.
• If a huge tool list is the problem, trimming the schemas is the only workaround anyone has posted.