# Reported issues for Agentic SSH

Pod holds 6 of 6 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded entirely — a maintainer's release checklist is not a warning to a prospective user.

Back to [Agentic SSH](/mcp/agentic-ssh).

## Most discussed

### Feature: Hierarchical Configuration Discovery (Global vs. Project-Specific Overrides)

### Problem Statement
As we introduce declarative tool and policy definitions (see #1), the system needs to dynamically scale across different development contexts. Some sensitive, internal repositories might require a heavily locked-down set of allowed commands, while a local home-lab or playground sandbox might want to expand permissions or enter a more relaxed "YOLO mode."

### Proposed Solution
Implement a multi-level configuration discovery path at startup that allows project-specific confi

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/9) · 2026-06-18 · closed · 5 comments

### feat: Add configurable connection timeout, SSH ConnectTimeout support, and fail-fast tool execution

## Summary
Enhance network resiliency and fail-fast behavior across `agentic_ssh` connection handling and MCP tool execution.

### Motivations & Key Improvements
1. **Configurable Connection Timeout:**
   - Add `connect_timeout_secs` in configuration (defaulting to 10s).
   - Support `ConnectTimeout` directive parsed from `~/.ssh/config`.
2. **Guarded Network Handshake:**
   - Wrap DNS resolution (`lookup_host`), TCP connection (`russh::client::connect`), and SSH key/agent authentication in stri

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/51) · 2026-08-28 · closed · 1 comment

### feat: add 'tools' command to list available MCP tools

### Problem Statement
Currently, developers interacting with `agentic_ssh` directly via the CLI or verifying tool definitions must look into the README/documentation or inspect JSON schemas to discover which tools are available and what parameters they expect.

### Proposed Solution
Add a top-level CLI command (e.g. `agentic_ssh tools` / `agentic_ssh list-tools`) that outputs:
1. **Built-in Tools**: All default MCP tools provided by `agentic_ssh` (e.g., `list_hosts`, `run_command`, `get_system_s

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/50) · 2026-08-23 · closed · 1 comment

### Documentation and Reference Artifacts for Agent-Friendly Tool Design

## Documentation: Add "Agent-Friendly" Guidelines to README and Create `agentic_ssh.toml.example`

### Problem Statement
As we transition to a declarative configuration model using `agentic_ssh.toml` (see #8), the effectiveness of the exposed MCP tools relies heavily on the text quality of their `description` fields. Human developers use intuition, but LLM agents parse these strings literally. Poorly written descriptions cause tool drift, execution loops, and hallucinated arguments.

We need to 

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/10) · 2026-06-18 · closed · 1 comment

### feat: add 'json' subcommand for direct CLI tool execution]

Implement a CLI subcommand to let developers call MCP tools directly from their shell and return raw JSON outputs.

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/35) · 2026-07-20 · closed · 0 comments

### Implement Host Group Aggregation & Startup Validation

Introduce support for a `[groups]` table in the configuration file to allow mapping a single logical name to an array of target SSH host aliases. This will enable both AI agents and human operators to target entire infrastructure tiers (e.g., `ubuntu`, `nix`, `all`) in a single query.

#### Requirements

* **Configuration Parsing**: Update the configuration parser to read an optional `[groups]` table mapping group string keys to arrays of host strings.
* **Startup Validation**: Implement a valid

[Read the thread](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues/19) · 2026-07-06 · closed · 0 comments

## Most recent

The remaining reports are on [the project's issue tracker](https://github.com/sandbanks/agentic_ssh/issues).