handwork

Some jobs need a person in the physical world: something made, measured, assembled, tested, or shipped. handwork is a small MCP server that connects an agent to a human service desk that takes on exactly that kind of work. It exposes three tools — a service catalogue, a quote request, and a status lookup — and forwards each call to the desk's public remote endpoint, returning the answer unchanged.

Asking for a quote is not placing an order. Nothing is charged and nothing is made until a quote comes back by e-mail and is accepted there; the tools themselves carry no ordering or payment capability.

Tools

• list_services — what the service will and will not do, the categories it refuses, example prices, how payment works, and the key contract terms. Takes no arguments and needs no authentication.

• request_quote — describe a physical-world task (what is to be done, which services it needs, deliverables, deadline, delivery address, input files, currency) along with the client's invoice details, and a human screens it and replies with a fixed-price quote by e-mail within 24 hours. The reply carries a quote_id and an access_token; keep the token, it is the only way to read the request back. No field at the top level is required, but the nested task object requires a description and the nested client object requires email and name.

• get_status — the state of an earlier quote request. Both id (the quote_id) and access_token are required. Records are kept for 90 days, and the quote itself arrives by e-mail.

Related MCP server: Counter

How it works

handwork is a forwarding client, not a reimplementation. It serves tools/list itself, from the tool definitions the remote publishes, and for every tools/call it opens a streamable-HTTP JSON-RPC session with the upstream — initialize, then notifications/initialized, then the call, carrying the Mcp-Session-Id header whenever the upstream issues one — and passes the upstream result through verbatim. If the upstream cannot be reached or answers with an error, the call fails with a handwork error: message instead of a fabricated result.

The upstream endpoint defaults to https://handsforagents.com/mcp. Setting the HANDS_MCP_URL environment variable points the client at a different endpoint (a reconstruction affordance; the published service itself names no override).

Run it

As an MCP server over stdio:

npx -y @reneturcios/handwork mcp

MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "handwork": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/handwork", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

In a container (the default command is mcp):

docker run -i ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/handwork
docker run --rm ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/handwork --version

CLI

handwork mcp          # serve the tools over stdio
handwork --version    # print the version

Any other subcommand prints usage and exits with code 2.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # node test runner via tsx; stubbed upstream, no network
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source

The tests drive the forwarding core against a fake JSON-RPC upstream injected in place of fetch, covering the handshake order, session handling, verbatim pass-through, event-stream responses, error surfacing, and a check that the served tools/list matches the captured upstream surface exactly.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.