Auto-load and auto-restart MCP servers without manual restart

Summary

Two related quality-of-life improvements for MCP server management:

1. Auto-load new MCP servers without restarting Claude Code — When a new MCP server is added to settings.json (or project-level config), Claude Code should detect the change and start the new server automatically, without requiring the user to exit and restart the entire session.

1. Auto-restart crashed/stopped MCP servers — If an MCP server process exits unexpectedly (crash, timeout, etc.), Claude Code should automatically attempt to restart it rather than requiring the user to manually intervene.

Motivation

When building and iterating on an MCP server during a conversation, the current workflow requires exiting Claude Code, editing settings, and restarting — losing conversation context each time. Hot-reloading new servers would make the development loop much tighter.

Similarly, MCP servers can crash for transient reasons (e.g., network timeouts, resource limits). Auto-restart with backoff would make the experience more resilient without user intervention.

Suggested behavior

• Watch settings.json / settings.local.json / project config for changes to mcpServers and start/stop servers accordingly
• On MCP server process exit, retry with exponential backoff (e.g., 1s, 2s, 4s, up to some max)
• Surface a notification when a server is auto-started or restarted