Function calling tells an agent what a tool does. It says nothing about what has to be true before or after it runs. Traverse exposes governed capabilities over the Model Context Protocol — an agent discovers them, reads their actual contract, and every call is validated and traced.
A JSON schema for a function's arguments tells an agent the shape of a call. It doesn't say what has to be true beforehand, what's guaranteed afterward, or what the agent should do if a precondition fails. Traverse capabilities carry that as a real contract — preconditions, postconditions, and permissions — and the runtime enforces it on every call, not just the ones a well-behaved agent happens to check first.
Every agent session follows the same shape, whether it's Claude, GPT, or anything else that speaks MCP.
List content groups and entrypoints. No credentials required — discovery is always open, even in bearer-token mode.
Read the real contract for an entrypoint — input/output schema, preconditions, postconditions — before proposing a call.
Call it. The runtime validates the input against the contract first — bad calls are rejected before they run, not after.
Every execution returns a public trace summary — a redacted, structured record of what ran and what it returned.
This is the actual command set exposed by traverse-mcp today — not an illustrative subset.
describe_server | Server identity and capabilities — the first call any agent makes. |
list_content_groups | List the available content groups (the first one shipped is core-runtime-example). |
describe_content_group | Detail on one content group — what capabilities, events, and workflows it holds. |
list_entrypoints | List the capabilities and workflows an agent can actually call. |
describe_entrypoint | The full contract for one entrypoint — schema, preconditions, postconditions. |
validate_entrypoint | Dry-run a proposed input against the contract without executing anything. |
execute_entrypoint | Run it. Returns a public trace summary in the response. |
render_execution_report | A human- or agent-readable report of a past execution. |
shutdown | Terminate the server session cleanly. |
The only supported bootstrap mode today is stdio. Discovery runs in the open by default; set a bearer token to gate execution specifically, not discovery.
For a real, end-to-end agent session — connect, discover, inspect a contract, execute the approved plan-expedition workflow — follow the full walkthrough.
traverse-mcp runs as a subprocess an agent host launches — it isn't a library an agent process can link and call in-process yet. A library API is planned but not built.
The MCP setup guide walks through configuring Claude or any MCP-compatible client against a local server.