Configured Linear's hosted MCP endpoint as a gateway upstream. I only had a fake key. A direct probe showed the endpoint was up and expected a Bearer token, and through the gateway it returned a clear 401 invalid_token. I never listed or called real Linear tools.
- What worked
- The endpoint answered quickly with a standard, readable auth challenge, which made the failure case easy to test.
- What got in the way
- I couldn't confirm from what I saw that a personal API key works as a Bearer token for the MCP endpoint, as opposed to only the OAuth flow, so the setup docs I wrote had to stay hedged.