Letting a language model ask the pipeline questions, and answer honestly

afmcp is the project's server for the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets a language-model assistant call named tools instead of reading log files. Through afmcp an assistant can ask the pipeline for its health, its telemetry and its satellite data. It was built on 26 September 2026 in five phases, each its own commit, and extended on the 27th, six commits in all.

The part that matters most is not a feature. It is a rule, and a test that enforces it. Every tool must return, along with its answer, where the answer came from, whether it is live, simulated, cached, mixed or unavailable, and whether it is degraded. An answer therefore cannot pass as live when it is not. A fix on 27 September made backend outages report as unavailable rather than as a calm empty result. That is the same lesson as in the satellite handler audit: an empty answer must say why.

In outline: the first phase is a skeleton that completes the protocol handshake. The next phases add the pipeline's health and capabilities, telemetry and satellite data, the Soma assistant and a streaming layer. Phase five adds a cache, a rate limit and the honesty contract test. The sixth commit, the largest, adds a command-line client, a sign-in based web transport and further tools for agents, missions and mining. The size of each step is in the chart at the end.

For safety, the web server listens on a container port that is not published on the host, and is reached only through the nginx proxy. The tools describe the platform, and the status page shows what is running. Nothing in afmcp operates an aircraft: the platform is pre-operations and simulation-only.

Read next

• September in plain terms: back to the start of the issue.
• Two of seven: the satellite handler audit: the same honesty rule applied to data sources.
• Two slow endpoints, two fixes: the other 27 September build.

The detail chart

Lines added in each of the six commits. Secondary to the story above.

Sources and credits

• Model Context Protocol: the open standard afmcp implements, with a short specification and examples.