Spare Cycles

Three short attention games you can play inside Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or VS Code while the AI works. They run as an MCP App: ask your assistant for "a game while I wait" and they open inline in the chat. Where the host supports it, you can pop them out or open them fullscreen.

All three are original designs. They use long-published research paradigms and are not copies of any commercial product.

The interface is a brain map lab:

• a side-view brain map shows the regions each task engages in imaging studies (approximate, with inner and deep regions drawn dashed);

• each game card has a level track (Comet Watch 8 levels; Lantern Glide 6 lure-similarity stages; Switchboard 6 levels of switch rate, preparation time and flanker conflict) and a trend line of your score;

• "Brain notes" on each card separate what the task engages, what training studies found (with dose), and what is not established. Every claim links to its source.

Hosts run the game in a sandbox without browser storage, so the game saves levels and history through the MCP server to ~/.spare-cycles/progress.json (set SPARE_CYCLES_DATA to change the location). The save tool is app-only, so the AI model never sees it. In a plain browser, progress is stored locally.

Install

You need Node 20+.

git clone https://github.com/frahman2310/spare-cycles.git

cd spare-cycles && npm install

In the configs below, replace /absolute/path/to/spare-cycles with where you cloned it. If your MCP host can't find node, use the full path from which node.

Claude Desktop: add this to claude_desktop_config.json:

{ "mcpServers": { "spare-cycles": { "command": "node", "args": ["/absolute/path/to/spare-cycles/server.js", "--stdio"] } } }

Cursor (2.6+): add the same block to ~/.cursor/mcp.json. A Cursor forum thread reports that MCP App views stopped rendering in 3.11.19 (they worked in 3.10.11).

VS Code: add this to .vscode/mcp.json:

{ "servers": { "spare-cycles": { "type": "stdio", "command": "node", "args": ["/absolute/path/to/spare-cycles/server.js", "--stdio"] } } }

ChatGPT and claude.ai (web): these need a public HTTPS URL. Run npm start, which serves MCP at http://localhost:3001/mcp. Expose that endpoint through a tunnel or a host, then add the URL as a custom connector (ChatGPT developer mode → Apps & Connectors; Claude → Settings → Connectors).

Anywhere else, including terminal agents like Claude Code CLI: run npm start and open http://localhost:3001/ in a browser or your editor's browser panel.

Then ask: "open spare cycles" or "give me a game while you work".

Related MCP server: SharedMemory MCP Server

Develop

Run npm start, then open http://localhost:3001/ to play in a browser.

• games.html holds the games and plays standalone. engine.js holds the adaptive rules. server.js inlines both, plus the MCP Apps bridge, into one ui:// page.

• npm test checks that the staircases converge where the theory says (70.7% / 79.4%) and smoke-tests the MCP server over stdio.

Disclaimer

This is an independent project, not affiliated with Posit Science (BrainHQ), Akili, Lumos Labs or any other brain-training company. These are short, simplified versions of research tasks, made for breaks. They are not medical devices and have not been tested as treatments. Results from studies of the original programs don't carry over to them automatically.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.