Witness MCP Server

Second brain for Claude Code & OpenCode: distills how your patterns and knowledge evolve over time.

Local serverstdioPython

What is the Witness MCP server?

Witness MCP server exists for a simple reason — assistants are far more useful when they can act on Witness directly instead of describing what you should do. Second brain for Claude Code & OpenCode: distills how your patterns and knowledge evolve over time.

What you get

A Claude Code / OpenCode plugin that quietly keeps a person-centric archive of how you grow and change as you work — your thinking, workstyle, habits, the cognitive traps you fall into and climb out of, and how all of it shifts over time. Not a record of what your code did (other tools do project memory) — a record of who you are becoming.

Setting it up

Installation goes through your MCP client rather than a global install: point it at @witness-ai/opencode on npm and it is fetched when the client starts. The copy-paste blocks for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are further down this page.

What the assistant can call

Once Witness is connected, these are the calls the assistant has available:

  • Lenses — The Lenses tool exposed by this server
  • Windows — Windows uses a self-contained zip instead of the shell installer (there is no guaranteed shell to run the hook shim). Download

Configuration and credentials

You will need one environment variable: WITNESS_MODEL_BASE_URL. The server will not start without them, which is usually why the tools fail to appear on a first run. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.

Before you rely on it

  • It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
  • Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
  • MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the witness mcp server does with a few real requests.

Choosing this one

Among the knowledge and memory options, the useful question is rarely "what can it do" but "what does it cost you to run" — permissions, credentials, and how much of your context its toolset consumes. Witness's toolset — Lenses, Windows — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by IngTian; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.

Available tools

ToolWhat it does
LensesThe Lenses tool exposed by this server.
WindowsWindows uses a self-contained zip instead of the shell installer (there is no guaranteed shell to run the hook shim). Download witness-windows-amd64.zip (Intel/AMD) or witness-windows-arm64.zip from the releases page — e

How to install the Witness MCP server

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "witness": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@witness-ai/opencode"],
      "env": {
        "WITNESS_MODEL_BASE_URL": "your-value"
      }
    }
  }
}

Add to claude_desktop_config.json, then restart Claude Desktop.

Configuration

VariableDescriptionRequired
WITNESS_MODEL_BASE_URLEndpoint or connection string the server talks to.Yes

Example prompts to try

  • Use Witness to Lenses.
  • Use Witness to Windows.

Frequently asked questions

It connects Witness to MCP-compatible AI assistants such as Claude and Cursor, exposing 2 tools (Lenses, Windows) that the assistant can call on your behalf. Instead of copying data back and forth by hand, the assistant works with Witness directly.