.engineering-docs/ folder: validating document completeness, checking cross-document consistency, and regenerating the master index. The server runs as a Node.js process communicating over stdio and is compatible with any MCP-capable client — including Claude Code, Cursor, and custom agent harnesses.
The MCP integration is most valuable in multi-session projects (where you want to verify document health without running the full orchestrator), CI pipelines (where you want automated quality gates on documentation pull requests), and team workflows (where multiple engineers contribute to the same document set and need consistency enforced automatically).
The .mcp.json configuration
The plugin ships with a ready-to-use .mcp.json at the project root that registers the validation server with any MCP-compatible client:
.mcp.json
node scripts/validate.js. It reads from .engineering-docs/ in the current working directory, so it must be run from your project root.
Configuring the MCP server in your agent
- Claude Code
- Cursor / Windsurf
- Custom agent / CI
Claude Code reads You should see
.mcp.json automatically when it’s present in the project root. No additional configuration is required — the engineering-docs server will appear in your available MCP tools after the plugin is installed.To verify the server is registered:engineering-docs in the output with the validate_document_set, check_consistency, and generate_index tools listed.The three MCP tools
validate_document_set
Checks that all required documents exist in .engineering-docs/ and that each has valid YAML frontmatter.
Required documents checked:
Frontmatter fields validated on every document:
Required frontmatter fields
validate_document_set response
check_consistency
Verifies cross-document consistency across three dimensions: dependency references, entity names, and terminology.
What it checks:
-
Dependency references — Every filename listed in a document’s
depends_onfrontmatter field must actually exist in.engineering-docs/. Missing dependencies are reported asmissing_dependencyissues. -
Entity name overlap — Using a heuristic of capitalized multi-word phrases, the tool detects when a document’s dependencies define entities that aren’t referenced in the dependent document. A large gap (more than 3 unreferenced entities) is flagged as an
entity_gapissue — informational, not always an error. -
Terminology consistency — Common terms that appear in multiple variant spellings across documents are flagged. The tool checks variants like:
check_consistency response
generate_index
Regenerates the index.md master index from all documents currently in .engineering-docs/. Useful after manual edits to the document set, after a brownfield run that appended new documents, or to restore an accidentally deleted index.
What it produces:
Generated index.md
generate_index response
generate_index produces the index content as a string in the response — it does not write to disk automatically. Your agent or CI script is responsible for writing the returned index value to .engineering-docs/index.md.The hooks system
Engineering Docs includes a SessionStart hook that runscheck-progress.js automatically at the start of every agent session. This surfaces any in-progress documentation so you can pick up where you left off — without having to remember which documents were still in draft.
hooks/hooks.json
hooks/hooks.json
What check-progress.js does
The script checks for a .engineering-docs/ folder in the current working directory. If it finds one, it reads index.md and reports any documents with draft or in-progress status:
Example hook output at session start
.engineering-docs/ folder exists, the script exits silently. If the folder exists but has no index.md, it prints a prompt to run the orchestrator. If all documents are final with no draft or in-progress items, the script also exits silently — no noise when there’s nothing to report.
When MCP is most useful
CI pipelines
Add
validate_document_set and check_consistency as steps in your documentation PR pipeline to catch missing required docs and terminology drift before merge.Automated quality gates
Block a sprint from starting unless all required documents are
status: final and owner_reviewed: true. The validate_document_set response ok field is a clean boolean gate.Multi-session projects
Large projects span many sessions. The MCP tools let you verify document health at the start of each new session without re-running the full orchestrator pipeline.
Team documentation workflows
When multiple engineers contribute to the same
.engineering-docs/ folder, check_consistency can be run as a pre-commit hook to catch entity name and terminology drift introduced by different authors.Example CI workflow
ci-docs-check.yml
The CI example above treats
entity_gap issues as informational (filtered out from the failure check) because not every entity in a dependency needs to be explicitly referenced in a dependent document — the gap heuristic is a signal, not a strict requirement.