forge-mcp

A production-grade, LLM-agnostic local development engine over the Model Context Protocol. One resident daemon. Any MCP client. Shared warm language servers, structural code intelligence, fingerprint caching, event-driven invalidation, and a self-healing supervisor — built so an AI coding agent gets compiler-grade answers without burning context, crashing tools, or leaking memory.

WIP personal tool. Successor to my nav-mcp; runs in parallel during migration. Design hardened across five iterations of research + devil's-advocate review against 2025–2026 MCP spec revisions, SDK issue history, and field-reported failure classes.

What it is

A single long-lived daemon on 127.0.0.1 speaking MCP Streamable HTTP, plus a tiny stdio proxy any MCP host launches as a "local server." The proxy auto-starts the daemon, authenticates with a per-boot bearer token, and bridges stdio ↔ HTTP. Result: OpenCode, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor — all sharing one engine: one set of warm LSP processes per (project root, language), one cache, one security policy.

OpenCode ──stdio──┐
Claude Desktop ───┤── stdio-proxy ──HTTP+token──▶ forge-mcp daemon (127.0.0.1)
Cursor ──http─────┘     (auto-starts daemon,        ├─ dispatch core (15 modes)
                         embedded fallback)          ├─ warm LSP pool, (root,lang)-keyed
                                                     ├─ supervisor (restart → circuit-break)
                                                     ├─ fingerprint cache (LRU+TTL, 64MB)
                                                     ├─ native fs-watcher invalidation
                                                     └─ 6 flat tools

Related MCP server: ACE-MCP

Why

AI coding agents fail in three repeatable ways: blind text I/O (re-reading whole files, grepping names, no type-level truth), fragile tooling (a crashed language server becomes an error-retry loop), and duplicated heavyweight state (every host spawning its own 300–700 MB tsserver). forge-mcp answers each: real LSP (definitions, references, diagnostics, semantic rename) with an AST/structural layer on top; a never-throw contract where every failure degrades down a fidelity ladder (LSP → tree-sitter → ctags → regex) inside a structured envelope while a supervisor restarts crashed servers; and one shared warm server per project+language across all clients.

Tool surface

Every response is a NavEnvelope — ok, engine (which fidelity rung answered), notes, pagination anchors, fingerprints — with cache/recovery fields emitted only when something noteworthy happened (token-lean by design).

Core guarantees

• Never-throw — the transport never sees an exception; agents always get a usable, attributed answer or a clean refusal.

• Self-healing — restart budget (3/5 min, exponential backoff) → circuit-breaker → fallback chain → half-open recovery. Daemon itself is crash-only: all state reconstructible; a daemon crash costs each client at most one failed call.

• Memory-bounded by construction — byte-accounted LRU cache (64 MB, 2 MB/entry, strict TTLs, errors never cached), LSP pool LRU + idle reap, refcounted didOpen/didClose, session sweep triad, child-process registry with kill-sweeps, capped child heaps. Validated by a <15 % RSS soak gate.

• Fresh by events, correct by fingerprints — a native filesystem watcher evicts caches within ~100 ms of external edits, but correctness never depends on it: mtime-keyed fingerprints remain the authority, and the watcher degrades to stat-based invalidation if it dies.

• Concurrency-correct — shared LSP processes with session-scoped views; diagnostics fan out to all waiters; cross-client writes serialized by per-path mutex and rejected on stale fingerprints.

• Windows-correct — cmd-shim command-injection gate, EPERM/EBUSY rename backoff (Defender locks), pipe-backpressure draining, detached daemon spawn done right.

• Secure by default — 127.0.0.1 bind, per-boot bearer token (stored only in %LOCALAPPDATA%, never in the repo), Origin validation/DNS-rebinding 403, canonical+symlink-resolved path jail, .env* guard, per-client tool profiles, exact-pinned deps.

Layout

Code lives in this repo. Runtime state (daemon.json + token, boot.lock, logs/) lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\forge-mcp\ — by construction, secrets can't be committed. forge.example.json documents config; the live forge.json is gitignored.

Status

Pre-implementation: design docs + reference_files/ (nav-mcp port source) only. Build proceeds through gated milestones M0–M7 defined in implementation_plan.md — each with verify gates, fallback behavior, and rollback. Agents working in this repo: read AGENTS.md first.