An MCP server can vanish from your AI agent mid-conversation. Here's the 30-second timeout that did it to me.

A Safari MCP server missed Claude Code’s 30-second startup window because it blocked initialization while finding the browser via AppleScript.

The server was killed before its tools were registered, so the agent continued without the Safari tools and fell back to Bash and curl.

This kind of slow MCP handshake can silently shrink an agent’s tool catalog with no obvious error to the user.

The fix is to make startup non-blocking and move window discovery out of the initialization path.