Conduit

Conduit is a local-first MCP (Model Context Protocol) gateway built by South Forge AI, released under the MIT license. It solves a specific token-overhead problem: every MCP server connected to an AI agent dumps its full tool list into the agent's context on every request, and with just a few servers that can exceed 24,000 tokens before a single word is typed. Conduit sits between AI clients and downstream MCP servers, advertising only 3 meta-tools that the agent searches on demand.

What It Is

Conduit is a native desktop application (built with Tauri + React, with a Rust gateway binary) that acts as a single local gateway for all MCP servers. Instead of each AI client loading every tool definition from every server on every request, Conduit exposes three meta-tools — conduit_status, conduit_search_tools, and conduit_call_tool — and routes calls to the correct downstream server at runtime. The project's own benchmark (published in BENCHMARK.md) reports 97% less tool-definition overhead per request and approximately 90% fewer total tokens at the same task success rate.

How the Gateway Architecture Works

Conduit has two components working together:

• The desktop app — a Tauri + React UI where users manage servers, profiles, credentials, and client connections.
• The gateway binary (conduit-gateway) — launched over stdio by each AI client. It reads Conduit's local registry, connects to enabled downstream servers (stdio or remote HTTP/SSE), and routes tool calls with per-server namespacing (e.g., stripe__list_charges) to prevent collisions.

The registry is the shared source of truth. The gateway watches it live, so toggling a tool or adding new credentials takes effect without restarting any client. Secrets are stored in the OS keychain and injected at runtime — never written into client config files or sent to the cloud.

Supported Clients and Integrations

Conduit detects and auto-configures a wide range of AI clients with one click, including:

• Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex, VS Code, Windsurf
• Gemini CLI, Cline, Roo Code, Warp, Amazon Q, Kiro, Zed
• LM Studio, Jan, Goose, Google Antigravity

Popular MCP servers available through the built-in catalog include GitHub, Stripe, Supabase, Vercel, Linear, Notion, Sentry, and Cloudflare. Conduit can also import a client's existing server configurations.

Governance and Observability

Conduit includes per-tool governance controls built into the desktop app:

• Toggle any individual tool on or off across all clients simultaneously
• A single switch hides every destructive tool fleet-wide
• Per-agent scoping via profiles — a coding agent literally cannot call a billing tool not in its profile
• Full audit log of every tool call with per-server latency and error rates
• A built-in tool playground to invoke any tool directly from its schema before wiring it to a client

Update: v0.3.15

The latest release, v0.3.15 ("Tokens saved counter"), was published on June 23, 2026. The project is in active development with the core gateway, lazy discovery, OAuth/key auth with live propagation, per-tool governance, audit logging, resources and prompts proxying, and the tool playground all working end-to-end. Linux support is in beta, with the .deb package recommended over the AppImage for reliability. Planned future work includes team/enterprise features such as a shared/hosted gateway, RBAC/SSO, policy controls, audit export, and secret-vault integrations as a separate paid layer under an open-core model.