Vitals now has an MCP server.
Claude, Codex, Cursor and any assistant that speaks MCP can ask Vitals what is happening on your Mac, instead of guessing from a list of processes. And an assistant cannot quit anything without asking you first.
If you missed the launch, Vitals is an Activity Monitor alternative for Mac. It groups every process under the app it belongs to, so you see about 60 apps instead of 1,000 processes. I wrote about why I built it when it came out.
Why I did it
On September 29 a customer emailed me one line: “Have you considered adding an MCP connection? Would love to be able to ask Claude for an analysis.”
Nine days later it shipped, in Vitals 1.4.
AI assistants already work on our Macs. They start dev servers, run builds, and when something is slow they try to work out why. What they see is a thousand process names and numbers, and from there they guess.
A guess is fine until the assistant decides to clean up. It cannot tell a dev server you forgot last week from the database you are working in right now. A wrong guess loses someone’s work.
Vitals already knows what those numbers mean. It counts every helper under the app it belongs to, knows which project a dev server came from and which port it holds, notices what is misbehaving, and keeps 30 days of history. Now an assistant can ask for that.
What you can ask
Nothing changes in how you talk to your assistant. Ask in your own words:
- What is slowing my Mac down right now?
- Which app is using the most memory?
- What is on port 3000, and is it safe to quit?
- Which of my dev servers have I not used in days?
- What drained the battery this morning?
The answers come back by app. “Chrome is using 24 GB” is one answer, not three hundred rows to add up.
Quitting goes through you
This is the part I cared about most. An assistant cannot quit anything by itself.
It asks Vitals. Vitals opens a window of its own, in front of whatever you are doing. The window says what is asking, what it wants to quit, how much memory that frees, and whether Vitals thinks it is safe. You click Quit or Don’t Quit. No answer in a minute counts as no, and after a no the assistant leaves it alone.
Vitals also says no by itself to anything that is part of macOS, to anything that would start again the moment it is quit, and to quitting Vitals.
For a project you trust, you can let the safe requests go ahead without asking. Safe means nothing of yours is lost: a dev server nothing has used, or a process with no window and no open connections.
You choose what it sees
It is off until you turn it on.
Settings → Integrations has a switch for each kind of thing an assistant may be told: your Mac’s numbers, your apps, your projects and ports, and your history. You can also give project folders by name only, so an assistant hears “shop” and not where that folder is on your Mac.
Vitals itself sends nothing anywhere. What an assistant is told goes wherever that assistant sends its conversations, and that is why the switches exist.
How to set it up
- Open Vitals, then Settings → Integrations.
- Turn on Let AI Assistants Ask Vitals.
- Click Add beside Claude, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor.
- If the assistant was open, start it again.
Using another assistant that speaks MCP? Click Copy Configuration and paste it where that assistant keeps its tools.
What the first day taught me
I asked an assistant to use it on my own slow Mac, and then to tell me where it fell short.
It found a dev server that had been running for 16 hours and holding 3.8 GB of memory, picked out the coding sessions that were sitting idle, and asked me before quitting each one.
It also came back with two complaints. It could not tell which chat each coding session belonged to, and “short of memory” did not say whether that meant memory or swap. Both are fixed in 1.4.1, which went out the same day.
How to get it
The MCP server is in Vitals 1.4 and later, and 1.4.1 is the one to have. There is a page for this release with more prompts to try and pictures of the setup.
The update is free for everyone who owns Vitals. Vitals offers it the next time it checks for updates. New to Vitals? Get it for Mac.
If your assistant gets something wrong with it, email me. That is how 1.4.1 happened.