{"slug": "show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones", "title": "Show HN: I built an MCP that gives DeepSeek V4 Flash eyes (bad ones)", "summary": "A developer released squint-mcp, an open-source Model Context Protocol server that converts images into ASCII art so text-only large language models like DeepSeek-V4-Flash and GLM-5.2 can attempt to interpret them. The tool, available via npx, produces poor results and burns extra tokens, but the developer invites pull requests to improve it.", "body_md": "Most LLMs see images. With squint-mcp, the rest imagine seeing them.\n\nsquint-mcp turns images into ASCII art for text-only LLMs (DeepSeek-V4-Flash, GLM-5.2). They can then squint, crop, squint harder, and eventually announce that your toaster is probably a building.\n\nTo use it:\n\n```\n{\n  \"mcp\": {\n    \"squint\": {\n      \"type\": \"local\",\n      \"command\": [\"npx\", \"-y\", \"squint-mcp\"]\n    }\n  }\n}\n```\n\nNot really. It is ASCII art doing a vision impression.\n\nIt can try. Sometimes the text comes back as decorative soup.\n\nThat would solve the problem.\n\nIt burns more tokens and takes forever—all for worse results.\n\nNo. But every now and then it [gets something right](/theJian/squint-mcp/blob/main/eval/results/real-world-summary.md),\nwhich is much worse for everyone.\n\nIf you make it less wonky, more useful, or better at distinguishing dogs from furniture, pull requests are welcome.\n\nNot decided yet. The code is young. Please be kind to it.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/theJian/squint-mcp", "published_at": "2026-08-13 10:36:46+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 11:11:28.655108+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["squint-mcp", "DeepSeek-V4-Flash", "GLM-5.2"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-mcp-that-gives-deepseek-v4-flash-eyes-bad-ones.jsonld"}}