pollard

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that exposes Firefox-format performance profiles (such as those produced by samply) to AI coding assistants.

The name comes from pollarding — the forestry technique of pruning a tree's upper branches to encourage dense, manageable regrowth — which is exactly what this tool does to call trees so an LLM can hold them.

Published to crates.io.

Tools

pollard exposes 16 MCP tools:

• Lifecycle: load_profile, unload_profile, list_profiles, create_view, describe_profile, summary
• Query: top_functions, top_groups, call_tree, stacks_containing, folded_stacks, compare_profiles
• Drill-down: source_for_function, asm_for_function, address_to_function, compare_functions

top_functions, call_tree, and compare_profiles accept an optional event argument: omit it to aggregate the default samples track (cycles, in samply's perf recorder) or pass a marker name like cache-misses, branch-misses, or instructions to aggregate that hardware counter instead. top_groups currently aggregates samples only.

See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-04-28-pollard-design.md for full details. See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-06-view-presets-cookbook.md for copy-paste hide_modules / hide_frames regex sets covering common Rust noise (tracing-subscriber, tokio internals, stdlib glue). The same cookbook ships as the pollard:view-presets skill — see .claude-plugin/ for the bundled plugin layout that registers both the MCP server and the skills.

Install

The pollard binary always has to be on your PATH — the plugin bundle does not ship it. Install with cargo:

cargo install --locked pollard

--locked builds with the dependency versions recorded in the published Cargo.lock instead of resolving the newest compatible ones. Or build the latest from this repository:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/antiguru/pollard

Then pick one of two ways to register pollard with Claude Code.

Option 1 — Claude Code plugin (recommended)

Installs the MCP server and the bundled skills (profile-recording, view-presets, pollard-doctor) in one step:

/plugin marketplace add antiguru/antiguru-tools
/plugin install pollard@antiguru-tools

The antiguru-tools marketplace also lists sibling plugins (binutils-mcp, timely-skill, differential-skill, columnar-skill).

Skills surface as /pollard:<skill> alongside everything else the user has installed. If a tool call fails after install, run /pollard:pollard-doctor — the doctor walks the install in dependency order and surfaces the exact remediation.

Option 2 — MCP server only

Register the binary directly as a user-scoped MCP server:

claude mcp add pollard pollard --scope user

The server carries its own usage guidance, so this path works in any MCP client. It sends instructions that tell the agent when to reach for pollard, and serves the recording and view-preset guides as the resources pollard://guides/profile-recording and pollard://guides/view-presets. The plugin adds the pollard-doctor skill and lets Claude Code load the guides as skills.

Either path makes load_profile, top_functions, call_tree and the rest of the tools listed above available in any MCP client.

Build from source

cargo build --release

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0.