My request: Can you figure out how to get IshRemoteMcpServer to work correctly with either the AI Toolkit or Continue extensions in VSCode?

Here's the reason: Our corporate policies prevent us from using most external AI models such as github Copilot or Claude. So to test IshRemoteMcpServer with our internal Tridion Docs environments I have to set up a local LLM instance (ollama in my case) and get it running with VSCode. It’s very slow and periodically throws errors (because VSCode throws a fit if it can't see its native Copilot when chatting is occurring even to another LLM) but it (sort of) works… I can start the MCP server and see the ishremote commands in the Tools menu. The model seems to recognize them but absolutely will NOT actually execute them. For example, I tell it to start an ishremote session and it shows me how to write powershell code to do it.

So I thought I'd swap in a more powerful AI with better MCP tools handling. I set up an instance of ollama on a server with a decent GPU, and an LLM (llama2 for now) can now be addressed over port 11434 on that server. The problem now is that there is no way to configure a local LLM server in the native VSCode chat via a URL.

So I tried installing the AI Toolkit extension, which supports local configs like this. Then I configured IshRemoteMcpServer and started the server via the extension interface. The first time, it times out: Unable to connect to MCP Server 'IshRemoteMcpServer'. Error: MCP error -32001: Request timed out. Please verify your mcp.json configuration settings. MCP error -32001: Request timed out. The log file ended with: 

{"Level":"Info","Message":"Starting MCP Server","Timestamp":"2026-01-22T21:36:02.1876440-05:00"}

The second time, I get Unable to connect to MCP Server 'IshRemoteMcpServer'. Error: Server's protocol version is not supported: 0.3.0. Please verify your mcp.json configuration settings. Server's protocol version is not supported: 0.3.0. The log file ended with:

{"Level":"Info","RequestId":1,"Request":"{\"method\":\"initialize\",\"params\":{\"protocolVersion\":\"2025-06-18\",\"capabilities\":{},\"clientInfo\":{\"name\":\"vsc-aitoolkit-IshRemoteMcpServer\",\"version\":\"0.28.2\"}},\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\",\"id\":1}","Message":"Processing request","Timestamp":"2026-01-22T21:36:02.2585314-05:00"}

I tried the same exercise with the Continue extension and got exactly the same behavior.

Log file for the second case attached. The log file for the first case looks exactly the same, except it ends one line earlier.IshRemoteMcpServer.log