Bookmarks Lifecycle MCP server

bookmarks-lifecycle

Give your saved bookmarks a lifecycle.

Saving is easy. Almost nothing you save ever gets decided about — it just accumulates. This is a local MCP server that puts every bookmark on a clock: 24 hours to decide, or 30 days to keep watching, or keep it for good. Nothing is ever deleted — a bookmark that times out without a decision just leaves your attention, not your disk, and every change (including ones an AI made) can be undone.

Aggregates via bookmarks-mcp. Writes only its own local state file, atomically. No accounts, no cloud, no network calls.

The model

Five states:

aggregate → inbox
              │ drip (up to N/day, oldest first)
              ▼
           pending ──you decide──→ watching / kept / lapsed
              │
              └──24h, no decision────────────→ lapsed
                                                  ▲
           watching ──30d, no decision───────────┘
              └──you decide──→ kept

lapsed ──restore──→ pending (clock resets)
any state ──undo (by history event)──→ whatever it was right before that event

From pending you can go to any of the three outcomes. From watching, a decision can only be keep — that matches the model above; to back out of a watch or a drop, use undo rather than re-deciding an item that's already moved on.

Bookmarks don't all land in pending the moment you aggregate them — a one-time import of 3,000 old bookmarks would otherwise all time out on the same day and the mechanism would mean nothing. They drip in at a daily rate instead (default 15/day, oldest first — by real save date when the source provides one). This is computed lazily whenever you call a tool, not by a background timer, and it does not accumulate across a long absence: however many days you've been away, one call promotes at most one day's quota. A 3,000-bookmark backlog at 15/day realistically takes months of daily visits to clear — that's an honest tradeoff of "no reminders, nothing runs unless you ask", not a claim that this replaces a habit-forming app.

Install

No account, no API key, no configuration — it works the moment it's installed.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add -s user bookmarks-lifecycle -- npx -y bookmarks-lifecycle

Claude Desktop / Cursor / any MCP client (mcpServers JSON):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bookmarks-lifecycle": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "bookmarks-lifecycle"]
    }
  }
}

To run from source instead (for development), clone parse-bookmarks, bookmarks-mcp, and this repo as sibling directories, run npm install in bookmarks-mcp and then in bookmarks-lifecycle, and point your client at node /absolute/path/to/bookmarks-lifecycle/src/index.js.

Use -s user. Without it the scope defaults to local, which registers the server only for the directory you ran the command in — you'd have to be inside that folder for your assistant to see it. Your bookmarks have nothing to do with which code project you happen to be sitting in, so register it once for your whole account.

Config file locations (for the JSON form above):

• Claude Desktop: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claudedesktopconfig.json (macOS)
• Cursor: ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or per-project .cursor/mcp.json)

Verifying it's connected: ask your assistant to call the stats tool, or check your client's MCP/server log — a successful initialize handshake and a tools/list containing intake, today, decide, list_layer, restore, undo, stats means it's up.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.