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4. Standalone Repositories for MCP Servers

Date: 2026-04-05

Status

Accepted

Context

With the decision to use MCP for internal tooling (0003), we need to determine where these MCP servers should live. Integrating them into the existing backend/ or backend/chain/ submodules would introduce conflicting dependencies (e.g., mcp and fastmcp packages) and complicate the existing uv.lock files, which are strictly for production application dependencies.

Decision

We will create a new parent directory mcp/ at the workspace root. Each MCP server (e.g., qdrant-explorer, langgraph-inspector, schema-inspector, imdb-sandbox) will be a separate Git submodule with its own uv.lock, isolated dependencies, and separate testing lifecycle.

Consequences

  • Positive: Strict boundary enforcement. The production FastAPI and LangGraph environments remain untainted by DX tools. Dependency resolution is isolated and faster.
  • Negative: Increases the number of submodules in the movie-finder project, requiring developers to ensure they pull all submodules upon checkout.