elway is a convergent deploy runner and it is good at that: 64 playbooks, sudo
handled once, upload, and three tiers of idempotency. It is the wrong shape for
"what is running over there", which is why this session answered every
reconnaissance question with a raw `ssh host '...'` despite CLAUDE.md saying to
use elway — a playbook for a read-only `docker ps` is ceremony, and each ad-hoc
command is a fresh handshake and a fresh permission decision.
The MCP server fills that half. It holds a persistent shell, so cwd and exported
variables survive between calls and a command costs ~6 ms rather than a full
connect. Measured against nh3-extdev and irv-ml1: state persisted across calls
on both, including the host reached over WireGuard.
CLAUDE.md now routes by intent — changing versus looking — rather than naming
one tool, because the previous single-tool instruction was being ignored in
practice for exactly the cases it did not fit.
Registered project-scoped rather than user-scoped: this workspace is where SSH
infra work happens, and a server that can open shells on the fleet should be
opted into per project rather than inherited everywhere.
SSH_MCP_STRICT_ALLOWLIST=1 is set in .mcp.json deliberately and documented as
load-bearing. Without it the allowlist is every Host in ~/.ssh/config — 18
aliases including both backup servers, database VMs and a tenant-managed host.
Verified: corviduo-dev, present in ssh_config but not in our allowlist, is
refused with host_not_allowed.
