Give your AI assistant your visual references.

01What you can ask

Once a board is shared, your assistant works with your actual references instead of guessing what you mean:

Search my Ambrel boards for dashboard references and look at the three most relevant.

Get the palette of the Project X board and use it for the colors of this screen.

Open the references on the Onboarding board and use their images to design the form.

02Set it up

In Ambrel, open Settings › MCP, enable access and select the boards to share; Inbox is a separate choice. Pick Claude Desktop, Cursor or Codex and click Copy Configuration. Merge it into your client’s configuration, keeping its other servers, and reconnect.

The snippet uses the path of the copy of Ambrel you’re running; if you move the app, copy it again. With Ambrel in Applications, it looks like this for Claude Desktop and Cursor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ambrel": {
      "command": "/Applications/Ambrel.app/Contents/MacOS/Ambrel",
      "args": ["--mcp"]
    }
  }
}

And for Codex:

[mcp_servers.ambrel]
command = "/Applications/Ambrel.app/Contents/MacOS/Ambrel"
args = ["--mcp"]

• Claude Desktop: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Cursor: ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or .cursor/mcp.json in a project
• Codex: ~/.codex/config.toml

Other clients that run local stdio servers can use the same command and argument.

03The four tools

• list_boards: the shared boards, with their names and how many references each holds.
• search_captures: search by words, board, tags, colors and type (image or link), with pagination.
• get_capture: one reference with its source, tags, palette, saved description, OCR text and the image itself, sent as a JPEG of up to 1600 pixels by default.
• get_board_palette: a board’s colors grouped by similarity, with their proportions and CSS variables.

Search uses Ambrel’s own index: titles, addresses, tags, OCR text and saved descriptions. The MCP server doesn’t need Apple Intelligence and doesn’t generate new descriptions.

04What it can and can’t see

• Off by default. You authorize boards one by one, and Inbox separately. New boards stay private; a saved search can’t grant access to the rest of your library.
• Read-only. The library is opened read-only. The tools take no SQL, file paths or URLs, and they can’t edit or delete anything.
• Revocable. Unchecking a board or turning MCP off blocks new requests right away, without restarting the client. It can’t take back what the assistant has already read.
• No network. The server sends nothing over the internet. The client you connect may send the references it reads to its AI provider, so share only the boards you want to use that way.

05How it runs

The MCP server is built into the app. Your client launches Ambrel --mcp as a separate process over stdio, with no window, no HTTP server and no need to keep Ambrel open. There’s nothing else to install: no Node, no Python, no extra account.

It supports MCP protocol versions from 2024-11-05 to 2025-11-25. MCP is included in the free trial and in the license, on any Mac with macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon or Intel.