Repo Roundup #4

This week I discovered 4 interesting repositories worth exploring further, mostly around MCP servers, which are definitely very hyped right now.

Thoughts on MCP servers

I think some of the MCP hype is definitely deserved but that a lot of people are putting too much faith in LLMs figuring out how to use them well. There is a lot of design and experimentation work to be done in creating ideal combinations of resources, prompts, and tools that are specific to each MCP server’s intended use-case.

I suspect that treating an MCP server like a REST API and just exposing resources without specific examples of compositions of them is leaving a lot of potential value unrealized. A lot of developers are throwing together quick MCP prototypes just to experiment but I think the deeper value of the abstraction is still to come when both the abstraction and the techniques for utilizing it are more mature.

Repositories

apple-health-mcp

This is an MCP server that takes CSV output of Apple Health data from Health Auto Export, an app I already use, and makes it queryable via MCP clients. I have been using Health Auto Export’s data to provide health metrics to a self-hosted VictoriaMetrics + Grafana instance to make the data more interpretable but hadn’t yet made it available to LLMs for further analysis. This repo seems like a good start on that.

iMCP

Similar to the other MCP server I mentioned earlier for handling Apple Health data, this is a macOS app that runs an MCP server which allows MCP-supporting clients to access even more of a user’s data from Apple services. I have tried it but I haven’t really gotten using its capabilities into my everyday routine yet. It’s “cool”, though.

serena

This is a cool tool which is an MCP server you can add to your MCP-supporting LLM client to make it more intelligent. The way they seek to achieve this is that it has more semantic awareness of your project’s code and can more precisely select the bits of code needed as context for your LLM-based agents so that they do not need to spend time (and tokens) processing an entire code file, directory listing, or grep results to find the relevant information they need. The promise is to make your agents smarter, faster, and cheaper. I guess sometimes you can pick all three.

harpoon

I have been enjoying using Zellij lately but hopping around between tabs and panes can be a pain (:troll_face:). This plugin tries to bring the behavior from the popular Neovim plugin harpoon to Zellij pane management.