sift-gateway

Overview

Sift acts as an intermediary layer between AI agents and upstream MCP servers or CLI commands. It addresses key pain points with tool output including large context consumption, inconsistent API responses, pagination issues, and sensitive data exposure. By storing full payloads as SQLite artifacts and returning either compact references or inline data, Sift improves accuracy from 33% to 99% while reducing input tokens by 95.4% according to benchmarks. The solution supports both MCP clients and CLI workflows with a unified artifact contract.

Try asking AI

After installing, here are 5 things you can ask your AI assistant:

• artifact

  Query stored tool artifacts with Python code

  Try:Query the stored artifact with Python code to find all pods in the 'kube-system' namespaceTry:Run analysis over the entire pagination chain of artifactsTry:Extract specific fields from the stored JSON data using Python
• gateway.inspect_tool

  Get full documentation for a tool from the upstream server

  Try:Inspect the 'list_files' tool to see its full documentationTry:Get detailed information about the 'query_postgres' tool
• run

  Execute upstream tool/command and capture JSON output

  Try:Run 'kubectl get pods -A -o json' and store as an artifactTry:Execute the 'list_files' tool with specific parameters
• next_page

  Continue pagination from the previous artifact

  Try:Get the next page of results from the previous queryTry:Continue paginating through the API response

Note: Tools were inferred from the MCP gateway functionality described in the README, particularly the sections on how Sift works with MCP tools and artifact querying. The exact MCP tool names aren't explicitly listed in the provided README excer

Comparable tools

Installation

pipx install sift-gateway
sift-gateway init --from claude

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sift": {
      "command": "sift-gateway",
      "args": ["serve"],
      "env": {
        "PYTHONPATH": "/path/to/sift"
      }
    }
  }
}

On Hacker News

Recent discussion from the developer community.

• Show HN: Keep large tool output out of LLM context: 3x accuracy 95% fewer tokens▲ 10💬 1
  Story by loumaciel · 2026-03-05

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