pulse mcp

Audience: operators wiring Pulse into an MCP-aware AI client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, generic MCP clients).

pulse mcp runs the Model Context Protocol server over stdio. The AI client launches pulse mcp as a subprocess, speaks MCP over its stdio streams, and shuts it down on session close.

LLM agents using MCP: the agent-side guide is the mcp-integration skill — fetch it via pulse_skills_get for the tool catalog and request shapes. This page is for the human setting the server up.

Synopsis

pulse mcp [--data-dir PATH] [--bind-on-open]

The command reads stdin, writes MCP responses on stdout, and writes a one-line startup notice (and any subsequent diagnostics) on stderr.

Flags

--data-dir is required in one of its two forms (env var or flag). The MCP server fails to start otherwise:

data directory required: set PULSE_DATA_DIR or pass --data-dir

–bind-on-open

When a session calls pulse_inspect successfully, the server can register session-scoped tool variants whose JSON Schemas constrain field-name parameters to the cohort’s actual fields. This narrows the LLM’s choices and prevents typos at parameter-binding time.

Default: true. Pass --bind-on-open=false if your client binds tool schemas itself.

The binding logic lives in internal/mcp/schema_bind.go; see skills/mcp-integration.md for the LLM-facing implications.

Wiring it into Claude Desktop

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pulse": {
      "command": "/usr/local/bin/pulse",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PULSE_DATA_DIR": "/var/data/pulse"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart the client. The Pulse tools (pulse_manifest, pulse_ask, pulse_inspect, pulse_predict, pulse_process, pulse_compose, pulse_sample, pulse_facet, pulse_import, pulse_drop, pulse_imports_list, pulse_examples_search, pulse_examples_get, pulse_errors_lookup, pulse_skills_list, pulse_skills_get) and resources (pulse://*.pulse, pulse-skill://*) appear in the tool/resource list.

Wiring it into Claude Code

~/.claude.json (or per-project .claude.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pulse": {
      "command": "/usr/local/bin/pulse",
      "args":    ["mcp"],
      "env":     { "PULSE_DATA_DIR": "/var/data/pulse" }
    }
  }
}

The full LLM-side recipe (including resource URIs and the schema binding details) is in skills/mcp-integration.md.

Exit codes

pulse mcp is a long-running process. It exits non-zero only on fatal startup failure (missing data dir, transport error). Once serving, an MCP client controls the lifecycle.

Examples

Foreground run for debugging

PULSE_DATA_DIR=/tmp/pulse-data ./bin/pulse mcp
# Stderr: pulse mcp: serving over stdio (data dir: /tmp/pulse-data, bind-on-open: true)

Disable schema binding

PULSE_DATA_DIR=/tmp/pulse-data ./bin/pulse mcp --bind-on-open=false

Inspect what the server registers

# Manifest exposes the MCP tool list
pulse --json | jq '.data.mcp_tools[]'

Related

• How LLMs Use Pulse — the pointer table from this site into the skill pack
• skills/mcp-integration.md — LLM-side wiring, tool catalog, resource schemes, schema binding
• Deployment — production hardening notes
• Troubleshooting — common MCP failure modes