Calling tools in 3rd party agents, apps, or IDEs with Arcade

Tools enable your AI agents to perform actions on your behalf. For specific workflows and use cases, this may involve calling tools from multiple servers. Arcade facilitates this by allowing you to create MCP Gateways to federate the tools from multiple MCP servers into a single collection for easier management, control, and access. For example, if your agent specializes in solving specific tickets in Linear, you may want to use tools from the GitHub, Slack and Linear servers in your agent. These add up to 88 tools, which could be overwhelming for an LLM to use effectively. What you want is to get from these servers only the tools that matter for your agent. An allows you to do just that: pick only the tools required for this workflow, and you can connect it to any MCP client, making it easy to port your to multiple platforms and IDEs, and even share it with other .

Outcomes

Create a coding agent using an Gateway to call tools from multiple .

You will Learn

Create an Gateway
Connect the Gateway to Cursor or VS Code
Call tools from the Gateway in your

Prerequisites

An Arcade

Create an MCP Gateway

Create a new Gateway. Go to the MCP Gateways dashboard , and click on the “Create ” button.

Give your gateway:

A name
A description
A slug (this is recommended so it’s easy to remember and share, but will be generated if left blank)

Select the tools you want to include in the gateway

Click the “Select ” button in the form to select the tools you want to include in the gateway. You can select tools from any server available to the active . For this example, select the following tools:

the GitHub server
the Linear server

Feel free to select any you want to include in your specific use case.

Once you’ve selected the tools you want to include in the gateway, click the “Use N tools” button in the tool picker, and then click the “Create Gateway” button to create the gateway.

There is no limit to the number of tools you can select in an Gateway. However, be mindful of how the MCP clients will handle the large number of tools. Some clients may not handle a large number of tools well, and may consume a significant portion of the LLM’s context window. As a rule of thumb, we recommend keeping the number of tools in a single below 80.

Connect the MCP Gateway to an MCP client

Arcade Gateways are compatible with any MCP client that supports:

Streamable HTTP transport
OAuth, or support for setting up headers for the HTTP transport

Get the URL of your Gateway by clicking the “Copy URL” button in the details page.

Cursor

Open the command palette (Mac: Cmd + Shift + p / Windows: Ctrl + Shift + p) and select Open Settings
Click on the New Server button

Cursor will open the settings file, and you can add a new entry to the mcpServers object:

JSON


{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mcp-arcade": {
      "url": "https://api.arcade.dev/mcp/<YOUR-GATEWAY-SLUG>",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer {arcade_api_key}",
        "Arcade-User-ID": "{arcade_user_id}"
      }
    }
  }
}

You can get an from the dashboard, following these instructions: Getting Your API Key.

The user ID is the email address that you used to sign up for the Arcade .

Try it out

Open your IDE’s chat pane.
Ask the to do something! For example, “Check the latest linear issue assigned to me. Then, create a new GitHub branch, implement the fix, and add tests. If all the tests pass, create a pull request and assign it to me.”

As you interact with the agent, it will call the tools from the Gateway. Your should prompt you to visit links to authorize access to Linear and GitHub. After this, it will start using to carry out the task! Subsequent calls will not require authorization.

Next Steps

Learn more about MCP Gateways.
Learn how to use Gateways with:
- Cursor
- Visual Studio Code
Build your own servers with arcade-mcp.