pollard

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 pollard

Or build the latest from this repository:

cargo install --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

If you only want the tools and not the skills, register the binary directly as a user-scoped MCP server:

claude mcp add pollard pollard --scope user

Either path makes load_profile, top_functions, call_tree and the rest of the tools listed above available in any Claude Code session.

Build from source

cargo build --release

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0.