mcpscope v0.1.0

The first public release. What mcpscope is, how to install it, and a worked example live in the README and TUTORIAL — this note is just the story of why it exists.

A couple of months ago I set out to build an MCP server for my home automation that could surface more insight and statistics than the tools I had, and immediately ran into the real problems of building for an LLM: writing tool descriptions that earn their tokens, managing context, and doing the data work server-side instead of handing raw data to the model. My target was small local models running in Ollama on an 8 GB GPU, so tiny models with about 8k of context.

I like that kind of constraint. I spend my spare time writing assembly for the VIC-20 and C64 and C for 8-bit AVRs, and an 8k context window feels a lot like managing memory on a small machine — every token has to earn its place. But I couldn't see enough of what was happening: OpenWebUI and the LM Studio chat show you the conversation, not how the model reasons, which tools it reaches for, or exactly how those 8k tokens get spent. So I built mcpscope to watch the harness work — tool calls and context management, part by part, token by token.

For about a month it was a personal instrument for my own curiosity. It turned out useful enough that I decided to challenge myself to clean it up and release it as open source — which was also a way to push a second experiment one step further: mcpscope has been built with coding agents throughout, across many models from small local ones to frontier ones. It's early. I'm about to put it to work on a couple of real MCP servers, and I fully expect it to keep changing.