Research Dispatcher

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets any MCP-capable AI agent run one research query across multiple public sources (Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Brave Web Search) in parallel, with source-specific query tuning baked in.

PyPI License: MIT

What it does

Exposes 5 MCP tools:

Tool	Source	Auth
research_hn	Hacker News (Algolia)	none
research_reddit	Reddit site-wide search	none (User-Agent only)
research_github	GitHub repositories	optional GITHUB_TOKEN for higher rate limit
research_brave	Brave Web Search	requires BRAVE_API_KEY
research_all	All of the above in parallel	per-source rules apply

Each tool returns JSON: a list of normalized hits with title, url, score/stars, created_at, and source-specific metadata. research_all aggregates into {source: {status, count, items}}.

Why

AI agents that handle "what's the latest on X" tasks need to consult multiple sources but each has its own API, rate limit, and pitfalls. This server encodes those once so the agent calls one tool and gets normalized results.

Install

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install canola-research-dispatcher-mcp

Configure your agent

Claude Code

Add to your ~/.claude/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "research-dispatcher": {
      "command": "research-dispatcher-mcp",
      "env": {
        "GITHUB_TOKEN": "ghp_... (optional)",
        "BRAVE_API_KEY": "... (optional)"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Code and the 5 research_* tools become available.

Codex CLI / Cursor / other MCP runtimes

Each runtime has its own MCP server registration. The command is always research-dispatcher-mcp.

Quickstart

"What's the latest on MCP server marketplaces?"
→ agent calls research_all(query="MCP server marketplace", limit=10, since_days=30)
→ HN + Reddit + GitHub returned in parallel, agent synthesizes

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
GITHUB_TOKEN	unset	Raises GitHub rate limit from 60/hr to 5000/hr
BRAVE_API_KEY	unset	Required to enable research_brave; without it the tool returns a "skipped" notice

Limitations

• No paywall / logged-in content (X/Twitter, LinkedIn, private subreddits).
• Reddit site-wide search has noticeably weaker recall than subreddit-specific browsing.
• Brave's free tier is 2000 calls/month; this server does not currently track quota.
• Source list is fixed in v0.1; add new sources in src/research_dispatcher_mcp/sources.py.

Development

git clone https://github.com/0x67108864/research-dispatcher-mcp.git
cd research-dispatcher-mcp
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Related

• The original SKILL.md format version: canola_oil/skills/research-dispatcher — instruction-based, drop-in folder for agentskills.io runtimes
• Agent Skills standard: agentskills.io
• Model Context Protocol: modelcontextprotocol.io

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Author

canola_oil — https://0x67108864.github.io/