Agents pick tools from MCP clients and registries, and Codeman had no MCP
surface: an assistant in Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI could
not start or drive Codeman sessions without hand-written HTTP calls.
`codeman mcp` is a stdio MCP server and a CLIENT of the existing HTTP API
(it reuses codeman agent's transport and guards; no new route). Seven
tools: list_sessions, start_session, send_prompt, wait_for_session,
read_output, interrupt_session, delete_session.
- Dual-era: answers the legacy initialize handshake (2024-11-05 to
2025-11-25) and the 2026-07-28 revision (per-request _meta,
server/discover, resultType, and the ttlMs/cacheScope hints a modern
tools/list must carry: Claude Code 2.1.296 drops every tool without
them).
- Never guesses a server: the URL comes from --url or CODEMAN_API_URL.
Unconfigured, it still lists its tools and every call says how to
configure it.
- Prompting, interrupting and deleting are limited to sessions the process
started (or, inside a Codeman pane, that session's own workers) unless
--allow-any-session; never its own session. Control bytes are refused
before any request.
- Waits default to 45 s (Codex's MCP tool timeout is 60 s), max 600 s.
- read_output returns text only: a client that prefers structuredContent
otherwise showed the model metadata instead of the output.
- config/mcp-registry/server.json and package.json mcpName prepare the
official MCP registry listing; sync-plugin.mjs keeps its version.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
With the repo root as the plugin root, `claude plugin install codeman@codeman`
copied the whole checkout into its cache and, because that root carries a
package.json, ran an npm install there: 832 MB, 511 packages and this repo's
postinstall build on every installer's machine (measured from a clean worktree
of the previous commit). A plugin root must be a directory without one.
The plugin is now `plugins/codeman/`: its manifest, a README, and a MIRROR of
`skills/codeman/`. A mirror rather than a symlink because the install copies
the plugin directory and a link pointing outside it would dangle; a mirror
rather than the source because every install path, injector and doc already
names `skills/codeman/`. `scripts/sync-plugin.mjs` (replacing
sync-plugin-version.mjs) mirrors the skill and syncs both manifest versions
inside `version-packages`; `test/plugin-manifest.test.ts` pins byte-identity,
the versions, the absence of a package.json in the plugin root and that the
repo root `.claude-plugin/` holds only the marketplace manifest.
`claude plugin validate --strict` now passes for both the plugin and the repo
root. Install commands are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer