IPC and Protocol

Transport choices

• MCP client to server: STDIO
• Server to inspector: named pipes

Why named pipes

Named pipes are a good fit for local Windows-only IPC because they are fast, ACL-aware, and straightforward to secure for a single workstation scenario.

Message framing

The inspector protocol uses length-prefix framing over named pipes.

[4-byte length][UTF-8 JSON payload]

This avoids ambiguity around message boundaries and handles large payloads more safely than delimiter-based framing.

Request model

• request/response with correlation IDs
• buffered events are surfaced by explicit drain, polling, or piggyback fields on tool responses
• bounded message sizes and timeouts

Operational implications

• pipe names are derived from the target process ID
• clients should not assume multiple concurrent servers can share the same target session
• readiness matters as much as process injection; a loaded bootstrapper is not the same as a ready pipe