MCP server

An AI agent on the server drives your projects through Pupitre rather than through the shell. ai.claude and ai.codex declare Pupitre’s MCP server in their tool on install, under the name pupitre, with the tool’s own mcp add command. You have nothing to set up. The other agents keep the dev command, which does the same from a terminal.

What the tools do

• Start, stop, restart a project or one of its processes. A start waits until the process is online or has failed, 45 seconds by default, and a failure comes back with the end of its log.
• Logs: the last lines of each process of a project, or of a service.
• Services: start, stop, restart a service already installed.
• Status and doctor: the machine, its services, every project and the state of each process; the machine’s checks with the fix of each failure.
• Screenshot: opens a page in the headless browser of ai.browser and hands the image to the agent, so it looks at the page it just changed instead of describing what it thinks it did. A project is captured on its local address, so the access key does not get in the way.

A screenshot is taken in a private temporary folder, read back and removed. Nothing is kept on the server, and no address points at it.

What it cannot do

The MCP server runs as dev, through the same limited session as the dev command. Installing or configuring a service, revealing a secret, opening a project to the web, dumping or importing a database stay your gestures, in the app, behind your sudo password. When the agent asks for one of them, the tool answers with the refusal and what to do instead.

That is why Claude Code may use these tools without asking you each time: ai.claude adds the rule mcp__pupitre to the permissions of ~/.claude/settings.json, beside your own rules. Remove it there to be asked again; the next update of the module puts it back.

It opens no port: the agent launches it and talks to it over its standard input and output.

On a server already installed

Update the agent from the app. Once the agent is up to date, the app updates the installed AI agent modules: they declare the MCP server and rewrite the machine context and the skills, which now point to these tools first.

Screenshots taken before that, in ~/shots, stay where they are.