Blowback MCP Server

Blowback – A Unified Front‑End Development MCP Server

Blowback is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server designed to bridge the gap between local front‑end development environments and AI assistants such as Claude Desktop or Cursor. While many MCP servers focus on a single build tool, Blowback extends support to a variety of front‑end servers—including Vite and others—providing developers with a single, consistent interface to interrogate, manipulate, and observe their running applications from within an AI workflow.

The core problem Blowback solves is the disconnect between a developer’s live front‑end server and the conversational AI that needs up‑to‑date context. When debugging or iterating on UI components, developers often need to inspect console logs, capture screenshots, or query the state of DOM elements. Traditionally this requires manual browser tools, screen‑recording utilities, or custom scripts that are hard to share with an AI assistant. Blowback encapsulates all of these interactions behind a simple MCP protocol, exposing them as reusable tools and resources that the AI can invoke on demand. This eliminates context switching, reduces noise in the development cycle, and allows the assistant to reason about the actual runtime state of the application.

Key capabilities are grouped into several categories:

• Browser orchestration – launches a headless or visible browser and automatically hooks into Hot Module Replacement (HMR) events, ensuring the AI sees real‑time updates as files change.
• State inspection – Tools such as , , and let the assistant query any DOM element, providing a snapshot of its current properties, computed styles, and layout metrics.
• Logging & diagnostics – streams browser console output, optionally filtered by checkpoint IDs that developers can embed in the page with a meta tag. This allows precise correlation between code changes and log output.
• Visual feedback – stores images in a dedicated SQLite database, while the resource lets the assistant retrieve them by reference ID. The optional flag can embed images directly into tool responses when needed.
• Network monitoring – captures request/response data for a specified duration, enabling the assistant to analyze API traffic or diagnose CORS issues.

Blowback’s integration model is straightforward: a single MCP server command is launched with an optional environment variable, and the server automatically discovers the front‑end tooling in that directory. The AI client then interacts with Blowback through standard MCP tool calls, receiving structured JSON responses that can be parsed or rendered in the assistant’s UI. Because all interactions are captured by MCP, developers can audit and replay sessions, ensuring reproducibility across team members.

In practice, Blowback shines in scenarios such as rapid UI prototyping, where a developer wants an AI to suggest component tweaks based on live screenshots and console diagnostics. It is also invaluable for debugging complex state‑driven applications: the assistant can query element properties before and after a user action, compare screenshots across checkpoints, and surface network anomalies—all without leaving the chat interface. By unifying these tasks under a single protocol, Blowback removes friction from front‑end workflows and turns an AI assistant into a powerful co‑developer that can see, interact with, and reason about the application as it runs.