The agent talks over local MCP. You still type abbreviations
You type xsig in mail, press Tab, and the signature replaces the abbreviation. That loop never opens a chat panel.
On the same machine, an agent in Cursor wants to create a snippet from the spec, or send a capture through OCR. It should not learn your trigger key. It should not ask you to dump the library into a prompt. It uses local MCP. People type abbreviations. Agents speak a protocol. Do not merge those into one product.
CodeExpander is not a chatbot. The search window can open an AI assistant. That assistant may call MCP tools. The authority is still the local snippet. Expansion still happens in the focused field.
Search window tabs: Search, AI Assistant, Marketplace — same labels as the app.
Bind 127.0.0.1 only
Open Settings → Extensions → MCP, enable it, copy the config, paste it into Cursor or Claude Desktop. The server runs on this computer and listens on 127.0.0.1 only. It is not on the LAN. What it can do is whatever the in-app card lists: look up snippets, capture, recognize text, insert. Plugins it creates still appear as snippets. That article is Plugins are snippets.
The doc page is MCP.
The local REST API is a second door. Open Settings → Data → Local API when your own script needs a list of snippets on this machine. The page shows a local address and an API description. It also binds 127.0.0.1 only. Use it to read. Change the library in the app, or through MCP. Two services, two ports. See Local API.
- Confirm expand already works: any field, abbreviation, trigger.
- Then enable MCP and point the editor’s agent at
127.0.0.1. - Open the local API only if a script must read the library. Do not expose any other address.
Offline, with MCP off, abbreviations still expand. A sign-in wall does not sit on that loop. If the agent cannot connect, your hands still type.
The plugin window, the search-window Plugin tab, and the dev window do not require MCP to be on. MCP is a door for the agent inside your editor. Daily insert for a person is still an abbreviation plus a trigger, or a row they pick themselves in the search window.
Do not let the agent replace your fingers
MCP is for generate-from-spec, look up, insert. The signature you type every day, the incident sentence you already finished, still belong in abbreviations. Do not leave the line you actually send alive only inside one chat transcript. How a prompt becomes a snippet is A prompt that vanishes in the next window.
The search-window assistant can enable “use MCP tools” (Settings → AI). That is optional. Turn it off and the abbreviation loop does not notice.
Do not
- Do not bind MCP or the local API to anything but
127.0.0.1. - Do not describe CodeExpander as a chatbot. Conversation stays in the assistant. Value is the expand in someone else’s field.
- Do not disable expand and keep only the agent. If the human path is broken, a complete protocol is the wrong product.
Related: MCP, Local API, Plugin Hub.