by cinderline
Buyer-run, ad-neutral shopping-agent MCP software with deterministic ranking, signed purchase mandates, and a local audit trail.
# Add to your Claude Code skills
git clone https://github.com/cinderline/northcindernorthcinder is an open-source ai agents skill for AI coding assistants such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and ChatGPT, built by cinderline. Buyer-run, ad-neutral shopping-agent MCP software with deterministic ranking, signed purchase mandates, and a local audit trail. It has 1,159 GitHub stars.
northcinder's catalog security scan is still queued. You can run an instant dependency and prompt-injection check now with the "Scan for vulnerabilities" button above.
Clone the repository with "git clone https://github.com/cinderline/northcinder" and add it to your Claude Code skills directory (see the Installation section above).
northcinder is primarily written in JavaScript. It is open-source under cinderline on GitHub, so you can review or fork the full source.
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Make your shopping agent compare, explain, and ask before buying.
NorthCinder is an open-source MCP server that helps an AI agent compare products against your brief. It returns a ranked shortlist with reasons, reports which stores it could and could not search, and requires a separate approval before checkout. Seller payment and affiliate data never improve a result's position.
NorthCinder is software you run. It works on your computer alongside the AI app you already use. The repository owner does not operate a NorthCinder service. There is no NorthCinder account, hosted control plane, or telemetry service.
You need Node.js 20 or later and an AI app that supports MCP.
npx northcinder init
The initializer walks you through local setup and prints the MCP configuration for your AI app. After you connect it, try a specific brief:
Find black wool running shoes under $130. Compare price, delivery, fit, and merchant trust. Tell me why the winner ranked first and which options were ruled out.
NorthCinder's response includes:
| Concern | NorthCinder's rule | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Ranking | Buyer criteria determine the order. Seller payment is not an input. | Ranking specification and ranking source |
| Sponsored offers | Labeled sponsored offers remain below every organic result. | Neutrality audit |
| Coverage | Unavailable and unconfigured stores stay visible in the response. | Adapter contract |
| Merchant trust | Every merchant carries explicit evidence or an honest unknown state. | Trust specification |
| Checkout | A signed, single-use mandate binds the exact offer, quantity, and spending cap. | Checkout package |
| Audit | Recommendations, approvals, and checkout attempts are written to a local audit trail. | Client source |
The client reruns the deterministic ranking over the service-disclosed inputs. This verifies the order it received; it does not prove that an upstream catalog was complete or that every store-supplied fact was true.
flowchart LR
A["Your AI app"] -->|MCP| C["NorthCinder client"]
C --> S["Buyer-run search service"]
S --> D["Configured store adapters"]
S --> C
C --> R["Local reranking and reasons"]
C --> L["Local audit trail"]
C --> P["Buyer approval"]
P -->|signed single-use mandate| X["Checkout rail or cart handoff"]
The repository owner is not in this runtime path. You run the client and aggregation engine, choose the store connections, and keep the local configuration and audit data.
Store access varies because each platform has different rules. NorthCinder reports a store as unavailable or blocked when it cannot search it instead of presenting partial coverage as a complete market search.
| Store | What works today |
|---|---|
| Shopify | Catalog search is available after additional Shopify setup. The older per-store connection is no longer current. |
| WooCommerce | Works with stores that expose WooCommerce's public Store API. |
| eBay | Native search requires approved eBay Buy API access. |
| Etsy | Native search requires approved Etsy app access. |
| Amazon | Read-only comparison can use a browser profile you control. It stops at challenges and does not check out. |
When a native store connection is unavailable, your agent may still compare permitted product pages with browser tools it already controls. NorthCinder accepts normalized product facts, not cookies, raw HTML, screenshots, page instructions, passwords, one-time codes, or your AI-provider key. Agent-observed offers must be confirmed by a native adapter or merchant protocol before automated checkout or an unattended watch.
Read privacy and software ownership and the security policy for the complete boundary.
northcinder 0.1.2 is the initial public release. The repository includes offline build, typecheck, test,
dependency, secret, packaging, and public-surface checks. Fixture and harness coverage does not prove current
third-party credentials, production access to every store, or a completed real purchase. Read the relevant
adapter documentation before relying on a specific integration.
The package is not yet listed in the official MCP Registry, and the marketing site in this repository has not been published at a canonical production origin.
This is a pnpm workspace. Product packages require Node.js 20 or later; the private site workspace requires Node.js 22.12 or later.
corepack pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
corepack pnpm build
Then run the local initializer from the checkout:
node northcinder/bin/northcinder.js init
Contributors can find the full release-verification commands in CONTRIBUTING.md.
NorthCinder is open source under the MIT License.