A rival to my open-source tool shipped. I read all of it — then ported its 4 best ideas the same afternoon.

A new MCP server showed up in the official Model Context Protocol registry last week, three slots above mine: safari-devtools-mcp. Same platform (macOS), same browser (Safari), same audience (AI coding agents). My first reaction was the honest one — a small jolt of oh no. My second reaction was more useful: I cloned it and read the entire thing.

I maintain Safari MCP — a browser-automation server that drives your real, logged-in Safari through AppleScript and a native extension. No Chromium, no headless, no second browser melting your fan. So a competitor called "Safari DevTools MCP" is squarely in my lane.

Here's what I found, what I deliberately didn't copy, and the four tools I shipped into my own server before dinner.

The architectural fork in the road

The very first line of its package.json told me most of the story: