Athena Mcp

athena-mcp

*When Hermes is stuck, it asks Athena.*

An MCP server that gives your tool-using agent a **reasoning sidekick**. One tool: `think`. No side effects — Athena has no tools of her own. She just reasons.

When your main agent (Hermes, Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP-speaking client) hits a hard problem — a subtle bug, an architecture call, a plan that needs critique — it calls `think` and gets back a concise, well-reasoned response. Your agent stays in the driver's seat; Athena is the quiet consultant it turns to when the problem is thornier than its default model handles well.

Inspired by [Codebuff's thinker agent](https://github.com/CodebuffAI/codebuff/blob/main/agents/thinker/thinker.ts), which does exactly this internally: Codebuff's orchestrator spawns `thinker-gpt` with no tools after gathering context, and the thinker's sole job is to think hard and return a brief answer.

Why the separation?

Most agents run on one model for everything. That model is a compromise: fast and cheap enough for hundreds of tool calls, smart enough for most of them. But when it's genuinely stuck, you want a *different* model — a reasoning-heavy one (Claude Opus, GPT-5, Gemini Pro, DeepSeek R1) — without ceding control of the rest of the task. That's what Athena is for.

• Cost — reasoning models are expensive to run on every turn. Call them only when needed.
• Latency — reasoning models think slowly. Save them for hard problems.
• Tool orthogonality — Athena has no tools on purpose. The caller stays in control of side effects.
• Model portability — swap reasoning models per call without reconfiguring your whole agent.

Two backends

**`claude-code` (default when the `claude` CLI is on PATH)** — spawns `claude -p` for each call and uses your Anthropic **Pro/Max subscription** OAuth. No API key, no per-token billing. Just counts against your subscription quota. Supports `opus`, `sonnet`, `haiku`, or full Claude model names.

**`openrouter`** — HTTPS