Connect an agent (MCP)

Point Claude or any MCP client at the resolved cascade.

Start the server

mcp-server.mjs is a dependency-free stdio MCP server. It resolves every read through the same cascade engine as the CLI — section/field merge, precedence, provenance, per-section conflicts — and exposes the result as MCP tools.

Point it at the bundled demo:

node mcp-server.mjs --manifest playground/manifest.json

Or use the legacy two-layer form, no manifest file required:

node mcp-server.mjs --personal ~/kb-personal --shared ~/kb-shared

--help prints usage for both forms.

Caution

The manifest is a trust boundary. A layer with "source": "mcp" spawns its command with args as your user. Only point --manifest at a config you trust — same model as any MCP client config.

Register it with Claude Code

Use absolute paths — MCP clients spawn the server from their own working directory, not yours:

claude mcp add contextcake -- node /ABS/PATH/mcp-server.mjs --manifest /ABS/PATH/playground/manifest.json

The server identifies itself over the MCP initialize handshake as contextcake. Any MCP-compatible client — not just Claude Code — can spawn it the same way: command is node, args are the script path and flags.

Tools

Tool	What it returns
search	One entry per matching concept ID, with a snippet and the layers that contribute to it. Takes query and an optional limit.
read_file	The resolved effective concept: merged sections, frontmatter, provenance, and per-section conflicts. Takes concept_id; pass layer to instead read one layer’s raw, unmerged concept.
list_concepts	Every effective concept ID across the cascade with its contributing layers. Takes an optional type filter.
get_links	Outgoing and incoming links for a concept, resolved against the effective graph. Takes concept_id.

Reading a resolved concept as an agent

Call read_file with concept_id: "decisions/primary-db" against the demo manifest and the response carries the same shape the CLI prints: contributors (every layer that has this concept, with its updated date), frontmatterProvenance (which layer set each frontmatter field), and sections each tagged with the sourceLayer that won them. Where layers disagree on a section, the losing layers’ content rides along as that section’s conflicts array instead of being dropped.

This is what makes the resolved graph safe for an agent to read directly: it can quote the winning value as authoritative, but it can also see that there’s a live disagreement, who holds each position, and when each side was last updated — so it can flag the disagreement to a human instead of silently picking a side, or weight a personal-layer note lower than a company-layer policy when they conflict.

Next

• MCP tools reference — full input/output schemas for all four tools
• The trust boundary — what spawning an mcp layer’s command means for the machine running the server