Core concepts

The six ideas behind every Protobox workspace: the endpoint, tools, toolsets, knowledge, prompts, and keys.

Workspaces

A workspace is the unit of isolation: it owns your connections, tools, knowledge, API keys, and billing. Its slug determines your endpoint URL. Most teams need exactly one.

MCP endpoint

Every workspace exposes one managed MCP endpoint over streamable HTTP:

https://your-workspace.protobox.app/mcp

Clients authenticate with a workspace API key in the X-API-Key header. Whatever tools, knowledge, and prompts the workspace enables are what connected clients see — one place to configure, every client updated.

Tools

Tools are the actions your AI can take. They come from two sources:

Integrations — apps from the catalog (Slack, HubSpot, Google Workspace, …). Connect an app once (OAuth or API key) and its actions become tools. Catalog apps marked coming soon are visible but not yet connectable.
Custom tools — your own HTTP endpoints or sandboxed JavaScript, defined in the dashboard, for anything the catalog doesn't cover.

Toolsets

A toolset is a named subset of your tools with its own scoped MCP endpoint. Use them to give each client only what it needs — a support assistant gets ticket tools, a coding agent gets repo tools. Without a toolset, the default endpoint exposes the workspace's enabled tools.

Knowledge

Knowledge is your searchable content: uploaded files, synced URLs, and documents. Connected clients search it through the endpoint (MCP resources), so assistants answer from your material instead of improvising.

Prompts

Reusable, parameterized instructions — your playbooks — exposed through the endpoint as MCP prompts, invocable from clients that support them.

API keys and secrets

API keys authenticate MCP clients and the CLI/SDK against your workspace; create and revoke them under Manage → API Keys. Secrets store credentials your custom tools need (third-party API keys, tokens) so they never appear in tool definitions or code.

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