Wiring Pulse into an MCP Client

Audience: Pulse internals contributors and integrators wiring the pulse mcp server into an MCP-aware client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, any custom MCP host).

Pulse ships an embedded MCP server that exposes the public facade through one tool per facade method plus the skills, examples, errors, import and label tools (the manifest’s mcp_tools block is the live list — never count it by hand) and two resource schemes (pulse://*.pulse, pulse-skill://*). Wiring it into a client is a three-step process: build, configure, restart.

1. Build the binary

make build

The resulting bin/pulse must be on the client’s PATH (or referenced by absolute path in the client’s configuration).

2. Configure the client

Add an mcpServers.pulse entry to the client’s configuration file (claude_desktop_config.json for Claude Desktop, ~/.claude.json for Claude Code) running pulse mcp and exporting PULSE_DATA_DIR:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pulse": {
      "command": "/abs/path/to/bin/pulse",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PULSE_DATA_DIR": "/abs/path/to/your/cohorts"
      }
    }
  }
}

The --bind-on-open flag (default true) controls whether successful pulse_inspect calls trigger registration of session-scoped tool variants whose JSON Schemas constrain field-name parameters to the cohort’s actual fields. Pass --bind-on-open=false for clients that bind themselves:

{
  "command": "/abs/path/to/bin/pulse",
  "args": ["mcp", "--bind-on-open=false"]
}

3. Restart the client

After the client reloads its MCP configuration the Pulse tools (pulse_inspect, pulse_predict, pulse_process, …) and resources (pulse://*.pulse, pulse-skill://*) appear in the tool / resource list.

Schema-bound enums

The full configuration recipe — including the schema-bound enums section that describes the inspect trigger, the multi-file limitation (latest inspect wins), and the transport-support caveat (bind-on-inspect works on the single stdio session via post-serve AddTool / RemoveTools; there is no per-session override for a shared HTTP server) — lives in Adding an MCP tool.

Verification

bin/pulse mcp --help
bin/pulse manifest --json | jq .data.mcp_tools

If the client supports an MCP tool inspector, point it at the configured server and confirm it exposes every tool the manifest’s mcp_tools block lists, plus the two resource schemes.