MCP connectors added on claude.ai mid-session are not discoverable until full session restart

Description

Connecting a new MCP connector on claude.ai while a Claude Code CLI session is running does not make its tools available in that session. The MCP tool registry appears to be loaded only at session start.

Steps to reproduce

1. Start a Claude Code session (logged in with a claude.ai account that has MCP connectors).
2. Mid-session, add a new connector on claude.ai (in my case: Lucid).
3. Ask Claude to use it — ToolSearch over deferred tools finds no matching tools (+lucid → no results), and the connector's tools never surface.
4. Only starting a new session (or claude --continue, which restarts the process) picks up the new connector.

Expected

Some way to refresh the connector/tool registry mid-session — e.g. /mcp offering a re-sync of claude.ai connectors, or ToolSearch re-querying the connector list on miss.

Why it matters

Long-running sessions accumulate valuable context. Discovering mid-task that you need a connector forces a choice between losing momentum (restart) or abandoning the integration (manual workaround). The workaround of claude --continue restores the transcript, but discoverability of that path is low and it still drops in-flight state (running background tasks, etc).

Environment

• Claude Code 2.1.172, WSL2 (Ubuntu 22.04), connectors via claude.ai

🤖 Generated with Claude Code