Show HN: Burnish, a UI for any MCP server (no LLM, no chat)

burnish-demo.fly.dev

3 points

a month ago

Burnish is a UI for MCP servers. You point it at a stdio or SSE endpoint and it renders each tool as an interactive form from the tool's JSON schema, then maps the response to a card, table, chart, or pipeline view based on the shape of the JSON. No LLM involved. The point is to see what a server actually does without wiring up a chat client or writing an inspection script.

MCP Apps (the official ext-apps extension) lets servers ship their own custom UI, but only if the server author builds one. Most don't. Burnish works with any server, including ones that have never heard of it, because it reads the schema and infers components from the output shape.

The hosted demo above runs a showcase server with 34 tools. Locally: `npx burnish -- npx -y @burnishdev/example-server`. Source is AGPL-3.0: https://github.com/danfking/burnish.

The thing I genuinely want to know is whether a generic explorer like this solves a real problem, or whether chat clients and MCP Apps already cover it well enough. Feedback welcome.

2 comments