## Roadmap 2026-05-06

redMCP is now being used in production, even though the changes to redmine's plugins and the semantic search feature are not yet in production. Since beginning production use, we have learned that the way the MCP server may return certain information wastes valuable tokens and context space for connected agents. This problem doesn't really seem to be an issue with the MCP server itself, but has more to do the contents of tickets themselves.

The issue is, the "description" field of many redmine tickets may contain a lot of extra non-printing characters, unicode, or things of that nature which do not seve any real purpose, and which waste tokens and context.

## Goal

Develop a plan for trimming fetched data to minimize junk information without harming the meaning of the data. This should, in particular, strip needlessly repeating characters from fetched issues or notes.

## Other issues needing addressed

- [ ] MCP server response when client requests projects by human-name needs to be adjusted.
	Problem: a client may call list_issues and for the project_id, they may pass "Quality Tracker", which is the human-facing name for that project in redmine. That fails because redmine expects to receive either the numeric project id or the slug (like quality-tracker). This is a mistake that humans can easily make as well.

	Proposed solutions:

	- [ ] When a "project_id" is passed to commands like list_issues and it contains any spaces or uppercase characters, that likely means the client is triggering this bug. If the subsequent call to redmine results in an empty response or error message, it would be helpful if the MCP server returns an error message that explains this problem.

