Give your AI coding agent a publish-HTML button (with MCP)

Stacktree has introduced an MCP server that gives AI coding agents a "publish" command for HTML files, generating private, unguessable URLs instead of requiring full deployment. The tool, available via a single `npx stacktree-install` command, works across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other MCP-compatible assistants, with links that expire after 24 hours by default.

Your coding agent writes HTML all day. A quick dashboard to eyeball some data. A PR writeup with a rendered diff. A status report, a Mermaid diagram, a one-off internal tool. Then what? You screenshot it into Slack, paste it into a gist, or spin up a Vercel project for a file you will delete tomorrow. There is a verb missing from the agent toolbox: publish . Not deploy. Publish. One file in, one private URL out. This post is about how to add that verb to any MCP-compatible agent, why "private by default" matters more than it sounds, and what the publish primitive looks like in practice. A deploy is a project. It expects a repo, a build, a config, a domain. That is the right amount of ceremony for a product and far too much for the artifact-shaped output an agent emits dozens of times a session. What an agent actually needs is closer to a paste-bin with teeth: The Model Context Protocol MCP is the clean way to expose exactly this. If you have not used MCP, the one-line version: it is the standard every major AI assistant now speaks for calling tools, so a tool you expose once works in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude.ai, and the rest. Longer primer: https://stacktr.ee/blog/mcp-servers-explained-for-developers https://stacktr.ee/blog/mcp-servers-explained-for-developers A publish-oriented MCP server needs one core tool and a few supporting ones. In MCP terms the action is a tool model-controlled , the list of what you have published is a resource the client reads it , and a saved "publish this privately" flow is a prompt the user invokes it . If that tools/resources/prompts split is new to you, here is the breakdown: https://stacktr.ee/blog/mcp-resources-vs-tools-vs-prompts https://stacktr.ee/blog/mcp-resources-vs-tools-vs-prompts The tool call itself is mundane, which is the point: // the agent calls: publish html { file: "dashboard.html" } // it gets back: { "url": "https://stacktr.ee/p/3f9a2c7b1e", "expires": "24h" } That is the whole interaction. The agent hands you a link. You send it to a teammate, who opens it with no account and no login. Public-by-default hosting made sense when humans hand-published finished pages. It is the wrong default for machine-generated HTML, because the agent does not pause to ask whether this particular file contains anything sensitive. It usually does. Private by default flips the burden. The URL is unguessable, so the link itself is the credential. There is no directory listing, no search indexing, no crawl. If you need more, you add a layer: a shared password, or an email-domain gate so only @yourco.com addresses can open it. For the genuinely sensitive case, end-to-end encryption keeps the host from ever seeing plaintext. None of that requires the agent to make a judgment call. The safe thing is the default thing. I build Stacktree https://stacktr.ee , which is one implementation of this primitive: an MCP server for publishing HTML, private by default. Wiring it into your agent is a single command: npx stacktree-install It detects Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode, and Amp, writes the MCP config for each, and the publish tools show up in your agent automatically. The first publish is anonymous and the link lives 24 hours, so you can prove it out before you even make an account. It is MIT-licensed on the client side and listed in the official MCP registry as ee.stacktr/publish . Source for the server package: https://github.com/stevysmith/stacktree-mcp https://github.com/stevysmith/stacktree-mcp Whether or not you use Stacktree, the pattern is worth internalizing: as agents generate more artifacts, the missing infrastructure is not more compute or a fancier framework. It is small, sharp primitives that fit the agent loop. Publish is one of them. A file goes in, a private link comes out, and the agent can replace it in place when it iterates. Happy Building