Merge pull request modelcontextprotocol#701 from LucaButBoring/docs/tool-name-conflicts

docs(tools): discuss tool name conflicts and how to resolve them

Author: jerome3o-anthropic

docs/docs/concepts/tools.mdx

@@ -213,6 +213,18 @@ When implementing tools:
 9. Consider rate limiting for resource-intensive operations
 10. Log tool usage for debugging and monitoring
 
+### Tool name conflicts
+
+MCP client applications and MCP server proxies may encounter tool name conflicts when building their own tool lists. For example, two connected MCP servers `web1` and `web2` may both expose a tool named `search_web`.
+
+Applications may disambiguiate tools with one of the following strategies (among others; not an exhaustive list):
+
+- Concatenating a unique, user-defined server name with the tool name, e.g. `web1___search_web` and `web2___search_web`. This strategy may be preferable when unique server names are already provided by the user in a configuration file.
+- Generating a random prefix for the tool name, e.g. `jrwxs___search_web` and `6cq52___search_web`. This strategy may be preferable in server proxies where user-defined unique names are not available.
+- Using the server URI as a prefix for the tool name, e.g. `web1.example.com:search_web` and `web2.example.com:search_web`. This strategy may be suitable when working with remote MCP servers.
+
+Note that the server-provided name from the initialization flow is not guaranteed to be unique and is not generally suitable for disambiguation purposes.
+
 ## Security considerations
 
 When exposing tools: