Visual Intent Layer

Point at what you see and say what should change. The agent changes exactly that, and you verify by hand. It reviews a browser-rendered artifact — a saved or generated HTML document, or a local web app running on this machine; a mobile build, a native window, a design file and a PDF are outside it by decision rather than omission.

Install

Requires Node 20+. No Rust toolchain, no hosted account.

The product is a standard local MCP server. You register it with your own agent's MCP mechanism — there is no install command of ours to run, and nothing of yours that we write.

Registry-aware clients can also find the server as io.github.willa-code/visual-intent-layer in the official MCP Registry, which lists where to get it rather than hosting it.

Install it on the machine where you look at the screen. The Review Surface launches a browser on the machine running the server and binds a loopback port there. A server in a container, on a remote host, or inside a cloud agent has nothing to show you.

Registering takes effect when your agent next starts, so restart it.

The pi entry

pi itself ships no MCP; pi-mcp-adapter provides it. Add this to the project's .mcp.json — merge it into mcpServers if the file already has one, rather than replacing the file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "visual-intent-layer": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "--package", "visual-intent-layer@latest", "visual-intent-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

A project .mcp.json applies to that project only. .pi/mcp.json is the Pi-only project override, and ~/.config/mcp/mcp.json applies to every project. Install the package globally (npm install -g visual-intent-layer) and the entry's command becomes visual-intent with args ["mcp"].

Update

@latest is resolved when npx fetches the package, so there is nothing to update by hand — unless your Harness caches the resolved command and keeps serving it: pi-mcp-adapter caches for 24 hours, reading the cache from disk, so a restart does not renew it. Delete ~/.pi/agent/mcp-npx-cache.json to force a fresh fetch. npm view visual-intent-layer version says what is current.

To hold a version still, replace @latest with an exact version in the entry. A global install updates with npm install -g visual-intent-layer@latest.

Uninstall

Remove the entry you added, with the mechanism you added it: codex mcp remove visual-intent-layer in Codex, claude mcp remove visual-intent-layer in Claude Code, and by deleting the entry from your Harness's own MCP config everywhere else. A global install comes out with npm uninstall -g visual-intent-layer.

Uninstalling deletes none of your reviews: Annotations, sessions and attachments stay in ~/.visual-intent-layer/data until you remove that directory. docs/guide.md names the file for the Harnesses that keep one.

If the tools do not appear

Run the entry's command by hand first. It separates Node and npm from the Harness:

npx -y --package visual-intent-layer@latest visual-intent-mcp

It prints visual-intent review service on http://127.0.0.1:<port> to stderr and then holds the connection open for an agent; Ctrl-C ends it. If that works, your agent's own MCP panel is where the reason is: it names the server and reports why it failed to start. The product cannot tell you — it writes no configuration and reads none.

The server runs without an agent too:

npx -y --package visual-intent-layer@latest visual-intent open --html ./checkout.html

Related MCP server: claude-annotate

Documentation

docs/guide.md is the product manual: the Review Surface, the Annotation model, target resolution, Check-In, the four MCP tools, environment and data, the envelope schema, develop and layout. SECURITY.md holds the threat model, supported versions and the disclosure process. docs/adr/ records why the product behaves as it does, and docs/pi-validation.md is the live-pi checklist, awaiting a human run.

License

Apache-2.0. The complete local loop is permissively open.