Orchestra Mcp

orchestra-mcp — a field guide to the Orchestra MCP tools

What the [Orchestra](https://orch.so) MCP tools do, what they quietly **do not** do, and how to tell which server and whose identity you are holding before you write anything.

Everything here was measured against a running server, not read from documentation.

What this is for

Orchestra fails **silently** in more ways than it fails loudly: a write returns success with a rejection list buried inside it, a board query returns 128 of 147 tasks with no error, a delete hangs to timeout and then keeps hanging for every delete after it, a thread accepts a reply that no read will ever return. None of that is guessable. This skill is the catalogue.

It is deliberately **methodology-free**. It answers "why did this call behave that way". It never says which task to take, when a task is done, or how work should be organised — that belongs to whatever runbook you use.

Install

# Global (recommended):
npx skills add ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp -g

# Project-only:
npx skills add ForgePlan/orchestra-mcp

Installs as `orchestra-mcp`.

What is inside

File	What is in it
SKILL.md	the router — which question goes to which reference
references/failure-modes.md	every way Orchestra fails silently; what is unreachable from MCP; what does not exist in the product
references/query-cookbook.md	filtering, sweeps, cost control, and how to cross-check a count before you report it
references/fields.md	value shapes on read and write, the two-containers trap, field types never to create
references/entities.md	creating, updating, checklists, messages, deleting
references/rendering.md	why written markdown never reads back identical
scripts/orch-verify.sh	deterministic server resolution + write handshake — exit 0 means safe to write
scripts/field-map.sh	dumps the field and option UID map from a running Orchestra

Two servers wear the same n