add-app-tool

add-app-tool is a skill for Claude Code from cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server. It costs 41 tokens per session (2,891 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of add-app-tool, Apache-2.0.

A guide for creating an MCP tool together with an interactive HTML interface. MCP is a standard way for AI applications to call external tools.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps scaffold tools with browser-based interaction, server calls, host settings, and a complete text fallback.
Why use it?
It helps decide when a visual interface is genuinely needed and accounts for clients that only support text results.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions Claude Code; mentions AGENTS.md.

Part of the attack-surface-mcp-server plugin — 32 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server/add-app-tool
Any agent
npx skills add cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server --skill add-app-tool
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install attack-surface-mcp-server, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for add-app-tool

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server/add-app-tool.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server/add-app-tool)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server/add-app-tool"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server/add-app-tool.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 41 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,891 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00041 $0.02891
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.01445
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00289

Measured 5d ago against content hash 96f3fdedf0a4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

add-app-tool scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to add-app-tool — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/add-app-tool/SKILL.md · 245 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 245 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

When to Use

App tools are rarely the right choice. Reach for one only when all of the following hold:

  1. A human will actively interact with the result in real time — not just an LLM consuming text.
  2. The target deployment runs in a client that supports MCP Apps. Many clients (Claude Code, Cursor, most chat UIs) are tool-only and will only ever see the format() text fallback you have to maintain anyway.
  3. The interaction the UI enables — scrubbing a dense table, approving a multi-step plan, filling a structured form — is core to the workflow, not nice-to-have rendering.

App tools cost more than standard tools: an iframe + CSP setup, app.ontoolresult / callServerTool plumbing, host-context wiring (theme, fonts, styles), and a format() text path that has to be content-complete because most clients see only that. Two surfaces to keep in sync, two failure modes per change.

Default to add-tool. This skill is the how-to once that bar is cleared — the "whether to" decision belongs in design-mcp-server.

Context

MCP Apps extend the standard tool pattern with an interactive HTML UI rendered in a sandboxed iframe by the host. Each MCP App consists of two definitions:

  1. App tool (.app-tool.ts) — uses appTool() builder, declares resourceUri pointing to the UI resource
  2. App resource (.app-resource.ts) — uses appResource() builder, serves the bundled HTML

Both builders are exported from @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core. They handle _meta.ui.resourceUri, the compat key (ui/resourceUri), and the correct MIME type (text/html;profile=mcp-app) automatically.

For the full API, Context interface, and error codes, read the framework's CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md (loaded at session start).

Steps

  1. Confirm the three conditions in "When to Use" apply — if any is uncertain, default to add-tool instead. Then gather the tool's name, purpose, input/output shape, and what the UI should display from the user's request — ask only if genuinely absent
  2. Choose a URI — convention: ui://{{tool-name}}/app.html
  3. Create the app tool at src/mcp-server/tools/definitions/{{tool-name}}.app-tool.ts
  4. Create the app resource at src/mcp-server/resources/definitions/{{tool-name}}-ui.app-resource.ts
  5. Register both in the project's existing createApp() arrays (directly in src/index.ts for fresh scaffolds, or via barrels if the repo already has them)
  6. Run bun run devcheck — the linter validates _meta.ui and cross-checks tool/resource pairing
  7. Smoke-test with bun run rebuild && bun run start:stdio (or start:http)

Read the full file on GitHub · 245 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 245 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A 96f3fdedf0a4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

add-app-tool is a skill published in the GitHub repository cyanheads/attack-surface-mcp-server (1 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 41 tokens to every session and 2,891 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to add-app-tool, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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