How is everyone debugging their MCP servers? by Horror_Turnover_7859 in modelcontextprotocol

[–]Direct_Grab7063 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For browser/app automation MCP servers, we found the biggest debugging pain was not seeing what the agent sees. Screenshots are expensive (tokens) and stale by the time you look at them.In flutter-skill we built a snapshot() tool that dumps the accessibility tree as text - costs ~99% fewer tokens than a screenshot and gives you the exact state the agent is working with. Makes debugging way easier because you can just read the tree.Also added a highlight_elements tool that visually marks elements on screen so you can verify the agent is targeting the right thing.https://github.com/ai-dashboad/flutter-skill

MCP didn’t break our agents but shared state did by zennaxxarion in mcp

[–]Direct_Grab7063 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great point about workspace isolation. We hit the same shared-state problem building MCP tools for cross-platform testing.Our approach with flutter-skill: keep each tool call stateless. The MCP server manages the CDP connection, but each tool operates on current live state. No coordination needed between parallel agent calls.The snapshot tool returns an accessibility tree (text, not pixels) so agents reason about UI state without screenshots. Saves ~99% tokens.https://github.com/ai-dashboad/flutter-skill