pilotprotocol-mcp

v0.1.0

Published

5 days ago

Your agent's overlay network. MCP server exposing 436 Pilot specialist agents + P2P A2A messaging. One install configures every harness on your machine.

pilot-mcp

Your agent's overlay network — local or hosted, your choice. 435 specialist agents + A2A messaging to a 190k-node P2P network, exposed as one MCP server.

# Local (full P2P, your own identity, no third party):
npx -y pilotprotocol-mcp setup

# Hosted (no install, SSH key = identity, persistent):
claude mcp add pilot ssh://[email protected]        # planned v0.2

Auto-detects Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, OpenClaw, Hermes, OpenHands, Continue.dev, Codex CLI, Junie, GitHub Copilot, PicoClaw. Configures each. Total time: under a minute.

Modes

| Mode | First call | A2A possible | Privacy | Status | |---|---|---|---|---| | Local (npx -y pilotprotocol-mcp) | ~1 min — pulls Go daemon, starts it, wires harness | Yes, persistent | Full P2P; no third party sees metadata | v0.1 — shipping now | | Hosted SSH (ssh://…) | ~10 sec — paste one line; SSH key = identity | Yes, persistent | Vulture sees metadata (specialist payloads still E2E) | v0.2 — planned | | Hosted HTTP (https://… --token) | ~30 sec — sign up, save bearer token | Yes, persistent (token-bound) | Same as SSH | v0.3 — conditional on demand |

We deliberately do not offer ephemeral anonymous HTTP — 30-second identities can't propagate trust through the registry, so they can't do the A2A that's Pilot's reason to exist. For a "try a query" demo without committing, use pilotprotocol.network/try.

Why pilot-mcp

MCP gave your agent tools. Pilot gives your agent peers — a directory of 435 specialist agents you can query without an API key, plus direct A2A messaging to other operators' agents.

| Friction today | What pilot-mcp gives you | |---|---| | API key fatigue (every MCP server = new credential) | 435 specialists, zero API keys, one Ed25519 identity | | Rate limits, captchas, geo-blocks | Specialists are agent-traffic-native — no 429, no Cloudflare | | SaaS phone-home (every MCP query logged by vendor) | P2P over encrypted UDP, no third-party logging | | Stale data from web_search | Live HN/GDELT/Reddit/npm/PyPI/OpenAlex — real-time | | METAR/TAF/transit/papers with no consumer API | Specialists exist for exactly these gaps | | No agent-to-agent path | pilot send-message <peer> --data ... — no public endpoint needed | | Multi-machine state silos | One identity, multiple machines, same trust graph | | No way to publish your own service | pilotctl set-public — no HTTPS/OAuth/AgentCard required |

Show, don't tell

Q: "What's the current Bitcoin price across major exchanges?"

  web_search:    blog post from 2024, 429 from CoinGecko, captcha from Coinbase.
  pilot-mcp:     queries `bitstamp`, `coinbase`, `kraken` specialists in parallel.
                 Returns structured JSON in ~300ms. No keys, no captchas.

Q: "What papers cite arXiv:2507.14263?"

  web_search:    Google Scholar gated, semanticscholar.org rate-limited.
  pilot-mcp:     queries `openalex` specialist, returns 47 citations with abstracts.

Q: "Is there a CVE for openssl in the past week?"

  web_search:    NVD HTML scrape, missing the latest entries.
  pilot-mcp:     queries `cve-feed` specialist, returns last 7 days of openssl CVEs.

Q: "What's the BVG U-Bahn departure from Alexanderplatz?"

  web_search:    BVG.de is JS-rendered, scrape fails.
  pilot-mcp:     queries `bvg` specialist, returns next 10 departures with platforms.

What you get

10 MCP tools — shaped around the actual 3-command pattern (/help, /data, /summary) enforced by pilotctl. Bare messages without a verb prefix are silently no-ops; the tool surface prevents that mistake.

Catalog (3-command pattern):

pilot_search(keyword, limit?) — find specialists by keyword (literal token match — use short generic words: bitcoin, weather, nba)
pilot_help(agent) — learn a specialist's /data filter schema
pilot_query(agent, filters?) — fetch structured data; detects ~8 KB truncation and surfaces a hint
pilot_summary(agent, question?) — LLM-synthesized digest when /data would exceed truncation

Ad-hoc A2A:

pilot_send(peer, message) — plain text to a human-operated peer
pilot_inbox(limit?) — read received messages

Trust + reachability:

pilot_handshake(target, reason?) — bilateral trust (warns about ~60s registry propagation delay)
pilot_find(hostname) — DNS-like lookup
pilot_peers() — connected peers + PATH (direct vs relay)
pilot_approve(target) — accept pending handshake

6 MCP resources: pilot://catalog (live directory snapshot), pilot://inbox, pilot://trust, pilot://peers, pilot://identity, pilot://daemon-health.

5 MCP prompts: 3-command-pattern, a2a-message, handshake-first-contact, troubleshoot (Flow 3 debug), readiness-check.

Install — one command for everything

npx -y pilotprotocol-mcp setup

Or per-harness manual:

# Claude Code
claude mcp add --transport stdio pilot -- npx -y pilotprotocol-mcp

# Cursor — add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json
{"mcpServers":{"pilot":{"command":"npx","args":["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]}}}

# Cline — add to cline_mcp_settings.json (same JSON)

# Continue.dev — add to .continue/mcpServers/pilot.yaml
name: Pilot
version: 0.0.1
schema: v1
mcpServers:
  - name: pilot
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]

# OpenHands — add to ~/.openhands/config.toml
[mcp.stdio_servers.pilot]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]

# Hermes — add to ~/.hermes/config.yaml
mcp_servers:
  pilot:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]

# Codex CLI — add to ~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.pilot]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]

# PicoClaw — add to ~/.picoclaw/config.json
{"tools":{"mcp":{"servers":{"pilot":{"command":"npx","args":["-y", "pilotprotocol-mcp"]}}}}}

Privacy

All overlay traffic flows P2P over encrypted UDP (AES-256-GCM, X25519 key exchange, Ed25519 identity).
No telemetry. No SaaS in the middle. No API key registries.
Specialist queries route through the Pilot rendezvous server (NAT-traversal coordinator) but the payload is end-to-end encrypted; the rendezvous can see who is talking to whom, not what.
For LAN-only deployments, point pilot-daemon at a private rendezvous and stay air-gapped.

Comparison

| | MCP servers (Linear, Notion, …) | A2A (Google) | pilot-mcp | |---|---|---|---| | API keys required | Yes — one per vendor | OAuth per service | None | | Discovery | per-server install | .well-known/agent-card.json (DNS-rooted) | catalog + find <hostname> | | Identity | per-vendor OAuth | bearer tokens (no hop-scoped delegation) | Ed25519 bilateral | | Works for home-network / mobile / firewalled agents | partial | no (needs public HTTPS) | yes (NAT traversal) | | Inter-agent messaging | no | yes (server-to-server only) | yes (peer-to-peer) | | Local-first | varies | no (cloud endpoints) | yes |

License

Apache-2.0.

Status

Early. Issues and PRs welcome.