Your App Should Ship an MCP Server

I’m building a native desktop editor for fiction writers. It’s written in Rust on top of gpui, by the Zed team. Under the hood, it generates a fiction specific AST, runs ~120 prose-craft analyzers and uses a multi-task ONNX transformer model against your manuscript in real time, surfacing things like show-don’t-tell violations, passive voice, pacing issues, and much more. I started out using gpui-component, but the available Input component was not sufficient for building the complex UI I wanted with a CRDT backing, so I ended up with my own buffer based system and building the entire text editing UX from scratch. This is not recommended! To solve for this complexity, I embedded a full MCP server directly inside the application binary. It has since become the single most impactful architectural decision I’ve made on this project, not for users, but for how I Claude builds the product itself. Here’s the case for why your application should do the same. The Problem: GUI Apps Are Opaque…