anchor-mcp
Anchor reads a team's interviews, tickets and docs and builds a model of the product — the decisions, the contradictions, and everything nobody has answered. This is that model, exposed to your agent over the Model Context Protocol.
Six tools. All six return the fragments an answer came from, because an answer you cannot check is a guess with better formatting.
Quickstart
Runs with no account, no key and no network, against a bundled sample project. Pick your client:
Claude Code
claude mcp add anchor -- npx -y github:amitboker/anchor-mcpClaude Desktop — claude_desktop_config.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"anchor": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "github:amitboker/anchor-mcp"]
}
}
}Cursor — .cursor/mcp.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"anchor": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "github:amitboker/anchor-mcp"]
}
}
}VS Code
code --add-mcp '{"name":"anchor","command":"npx","args":["-y","github:amitboker/anchor-mcp"]}'Restart the client afterwards — all of them read MCP config at boot.
Not on npm yet, so the specs above install from this repository.
npxbuilds it on first run, which takes a few seconds once and is cached after that.
Tools
Tool | What it does |
| Ask a question about the product. Returns the fragments that bear on it, each with its source. |
| Statements that cannot both be true, both sides quoted, and the question that resolves each. |
| Questions no source answers, who can answer them, and what they block. |
| Everything the brain has read, and how many fragments came out of each. |
| Open one fragment by id — full text and where it sits in its source. |
| A PRD section, user stories or acceptance criteria, every line traced to a fragment. |
What comes back
$ list_contradictions
3 contradictions in checkout-redesign.
## Cart retention window (c-01)
A. The cart persists for 30 days on an unauthenticated session.
— prd-checkout-v3 · §3.1 (PRD — Checkout redesign, v3)
B. Unauthenticated carts must expire within 7 days.
— sec-review-q2 · Findings, item 4 (Security review — payments surface)
→ Does guest checkout keep a 30-day cart and require an identity, or drop
to a 7-day window and stay anonymous?Two documents, four months apart, in two different tools. Neither author was wrong. Nobody was going to notice.
Two things it will not do
It does not answer what it has not read:
$ ask_brain "quarterly revenue in Belgium"
Nothing in checkout-redesign answers that.And it does not draft without sources:
$ draft --kind prd_section --topic "offline sync"
Not drafting "offline sync" — nothing in checkout-redesign supports it.Both are the product working. A tool that fills a gap it cannot see the bottom of is the failure mode this exists to remove.
Sample data, and real projects
Out of the box the server runs on a bundled fixture — a checkout-redesign
project with six sources and ten fragments. Every source, quote and person in
it is invented, and every response says so in its footer.
Set ANCHOR_API_KEY and the same six tools read a real Project Brain
instead. The output shape does not change; only the data does.
{
"mcpServers": {
"anchor": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "github:amitboker/anchor-mcp"],
"env": { "ANCHOR_API_KEY": "${ANCHOR_API_KEY}" }
}
}
}Reference the variable from your shell rather than pasting a key into a file you might commit.
Status: preview. The tool surface is stable enough to build against. The hosted API behind
ANCHOR_API_KEYis not open yet — until it is, every answer comes from the sample project.
Development
npm install
npm run build
npm run inspectnpm run inspect opens the MCP Inspector
against your local build, which is the fastest way to see a tool's real
output while changing it.
src/
index.ts server + tool registration
tools.ts tool bodies, callable without a transport
brain.ts the sample project
cite.ts citation formattingOne rule worth knowing before you add a tool: every response goes through
answer() in cite.ts, and its cites argument is a non-empty tuple. An
uncited answer is a type error rather than a matter of discipline — which is
the only way a rule like that survives a deadline.
Logging goes to stderr, never stdout. stdout is the JSON-RPC transport,
and one stray console.log on it corrupts the stream and takes the session
with it.
Links
Anchor — the product
Model Context Protocol — the spec
License
MIT — see LICENSE.