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 GitHub, Slack and Linear tools in your agent, but not all of them at the same time. An allows you to 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 event 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

To 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 Tools” 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 project. For this example, we’ll select the tools from the GitHub , as well as the from the Linear MCP server. Feel free to select any tools 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:

The 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 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}"
      }
    }
  }
}

Try it out

Open the 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”

Next Steps

Learn more about MCP Gateways. Build your own servers with arcade-mcp.