white-box-synthesis

An MCP server that verifies a synthesised passage preserves the human-ness of its source passages.

What it does and does not do

The agent does the synthesis. The server checks the work. It holds no model, no API key and no semantic judgment.

The property under verification is human-ness, not meaning. Meaning is yours to proof. What the server certifies is that every character of the output is either verbatim human text from a source passage, or the product of a declared, bounded transformation of one.

That framing decides which operations need checking:

Removing and moving cannot introduce machine text, so they are free. INFLECT and NORMALISE are the only places machine text can enter, so they are the only operations that will ever need real verification.

This diverges deliberately from the draft-writing skill, whose DELETE removes repetition only when subject, claim, scope, modality and qualification are identical, and whose ORDER requires an approved original establishing the relation. Both conditions preserve meaning, which is not this server's job. The skill needs updating to match. The two live in separate repositories and can drift, so treat the skill as the definition of the operations and this README as the record of where the verifier knowingly departs from it.

The two checks that carry v0

1. COPY resolution. The quoted span must exist in the named passage at the stated occurrence, exactly.

2. Reconstruction. The text of all content-producing operations, joined in list order, must match the submitted output. Whitespace is ignored, because spacing is not content. Every other character difference fails.

Together these mean an invented word cannot pass. Punctuation does not travel for free either: a comma becoming a full stop is a NORMALISE operation and must be declared.

Report

Each operation returns verified, unverified or failed. Citation labels on passages flow through to the report for footnoting. One failure rejects the whole derivation, because the report certifies a derivation rather than a set of parts.

Provenance declaration

Every derivation returns the compact declaration from the provenance contract, derived mechanically:

**Provenance:** Mixed · Human wording: 100% · Method: white-box synthesis · Basis: A4, user-21

Basis is deduplicated in first-use order with the src: prefix stripped. Provenance is Human for a single unaltered span, Mixed for several, Unverified when anything failed.

The honest consequence of v0. The contract allows Human wording: 100% only when every span passes the reconstruction test, which requires a sequence of permitted operations. v0 logs INFLECT and NORMALISE without checking that they are legal. So any derivation using either declares Human wording: Unverified and sets blocks_selection. Only COPY, DELETE and ORDER reach 100%.

That is the roadmap with teeth: until the NORMALISE whitelist and INFLECT morphology exist, no passage using them can be declared clean.

Typed gaps

A gap is a successful outcome. It must carry one of the six types from the skill (Missing user wording, Missing evidence, Unsupported connection, Source-context ambiguity, Arc inconsistency, Constraint conflict) and all six fields: passage_id, argument_id, missing_requirement, authoritative_owner, question, resolution_paths. Untyped gaps are rejected.

Install

This is a working MCP server: one tool, verify_synthesis, and one prompt, white_box_synthesis_process. It speaks stdio, so the client launches it as a subprocess. Nothing is hosted.

Installation goes straight from this repository. There is no clone step and no PyPI release. uv does the work:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/AhmedKishki/mcp-white-box-synthesis white-box-synthesis

Note the two names differ and both are needed. --from takes the repository (mcp-white-box-synthesis); the trailing argument is the console script (white-box-synthesis). Repeating the repo name there fails with an executable not found.

It will sit silently waiting for JSON-RPC on stdin. That is correct. Ctrl-C out.

Pin a tag for reproducibility:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/AhmedKishki/mcp-white-box-synthesis@v0.1.0 white-box-synthesis

Claude Code

stdio is the default transport, so no transport flag is needed. Options go before the name, and -- separates them from the launch command:

claude mcp add white-box-synthesis \
  -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/AhmedKishki/mcp-white-box-synthesis white-box-synthesis

Scope defaults to local. --scope project writes a committable .mcp.json, --scope user makes it available across projects. Confirm with /mcp.

Cline, Claude Desktop, Kimi Code CLI, anything JSON-configured

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "white-box-synthesis": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "--from",
        "git+https://github.com/AhmedKishki/mcp-white-box-synthesis",
        "white-box-synthesis"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Releasing

Bump version in pyproject.toml and the MCPServer(...) call in server.py, then tag:

git tag v0.1.1 && git push --tags

Anyone pinning a tag gets that build. Anyone on the bare URL gets main.

Local development

git clone https://github.com/AhmedKishki/mcp-white-box-synthesis
cd mcp-white-box-synthesis
uvx --from . white-box-synthesis

Verify it handshakes

printf '%s\n' \
'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"probe","version":"1"}}}' \
'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}' \
'{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/list"}' \
| uvx --from . white-box-synthesis

Four things that will bite you

• Use absolute paths. The client spawns the server from its own working directory, not yours.

• uvx must be on the PATH the client sees. GUI apps often do not inherit your shell PATH. If the server fails to start, replace uvx with the full path from which uvx.

• Never print to stdout. On stdio transport, stdout is the protocol channel. Any stray print() corrupts the stream. Log to stderr.

• uvx caches the build. During local development your edits will not appear until you run uv cache clean, or install editable with uv tool install --editable .. The same cache means an unpinned git install will not pick up new commits immediately either.

Tests

python3 tests/test_verify.py

No dependencies. verify.py is deliberately free of MCP, network and model imports.

Backlog

Ordered by dependency weight. Testing decides what actually comes forward.

1. NORMALISE whitelist. A literal dictionary of substitution pairs, no dependencies. Seed it from what actually appears in testing. Must be lexicalised, not regex: an -ize to -ise rule turns size into sise.

2. INFLECT morphology. Needs spaCy. Covers tense, number, case, article. The pronoun sub-case is separate: count agreement-filtered antecedent candidates in a local window.

3. Connectors. The skill requires that every word, including a function word inserted at a join, occurs in an approved fragment. So connectors are drawn from fragments rather than invented, which makes them a constrained COPY and mechanically checkable.

Not yet built, and they change the input schema

• Argument structure. The skill's Record is one row per argument against a passage plan with a passage claim and ordered argument IDs. The flat operations list cannot produce that table.

• Protected regions. Direct quotations, code, URLs, titles, citation data and proper names must stay exact, and INFLECT and NORMALISE apply only to unquoted output. Mechanical once regions are marked. Nothing implements it.

• Locators. The skill addresses fragments by code plus paragraph N or lines N-M, with exact quotations only to resolve ambiguity. This server uses occurrence-numbered quotations instead.

Dropped from the original design once the human-ness framing settled: the DELETE duplicate-overlap check, the DELETE irrelevance embedding check, and the ORDER marker lexicon. All three were checking meaning, which is not this server's job.

Known gap

Because whitespace is ignored, a run-together join like theunion passes. That is a typo rather than a human-ness violation, and it belongs to your proofing pass.