Custom AI View 1.14 Windows · macOS · VS Code · MCP
Chrome's device toolbar resizes a viewport. It does not give you a phone, and it does not give an agent anything to look at. Custom AI View puts a real browser inside pixel-accurate device frames and hands the window you are looking at straight to your agent over MCP.
Free. No install, no dependencies — it needs Chrome or Edge on the machine. Intel Mac and VS Code below.
Fig. 01 — the window, and what the agent sees of it
MacBook Pro 14" · 1512 × 982 pt · 302 × 196 mm
Just talk to it. Your calendar, clients, finance and self-booking — run by a live voice AI in one app. 43 languages. Free to start.
No credit card. 2-minute setup. · Web, iOS — Android coming.
MacBook Pro 14" · 1512 × 982 pt · @2x · 3024 × 1964 px · 302 × 196 mm
try itThat is not a screenshot. Move the pointer over the site inside the lid — the element is outlined and revealed in the tree, exactly the way the real inspector behaves. In the app the page inside is a live browser with your session in it.
§ 01
Framing a page is the easy quarter of the problem. Showing a site that refuses to be framed, keeping the session alive across restarts, and being honest about millimetres — that is the rest of it.
01
Your login session, your scroll position, your unsaved input — handed to an agent over MCP as a picture. Not a re-render in a clean profile: the screen you can see. And when it genuinely cannot use the live window, the answer says so, instead of printing the same line for both.
02
A local reverse proxy strips X-Frame-Options and CSP, rewrites @media (hover) and env(safe-area-inset-*), renames __Host- cookies so logins survive a restart, and terminates the self-signed TLS a dev server speaks.
03
Bodies, screens and corner radii come from the makers' published dimensions in millimetres; bezels are derived from body minus panel. mm/pt = dpr × 25.4 / ppi. Actual size 1:1 measures your monitor over EDID and draws the device at life size — hold a real iPhone against the glass and it matches.
§ 02
Head-on, a MacBook is one sheet of black glass with a hairline of anodised edge — not an aluminium picture frame. The chin is three times the forehead, because the wordmark is etched there. The notch is cut into the menu bar, where a browser window never reaches, so it is never a black rectangle over your site. The lid above is drawn by the same rules.
env(safe-area-inset-bottom) still reports 34.screenshots/, recordings/, logs/ and code/, plus one button that saves everything about the page at once.Fig. 02 — dev servers, found rather than guessed
It asks the operating system what is listening, then asks each port whether it serves pages — and shows the site's own title and icon. The one on 8899 is on no list of usual ports.
§ 03
The server speaks MCP over stdio, so any MCP client can drive the same window you are looking at. Every tool takes a window argument, so a phone and an iPad can be driven side by side.
Add the server once. It starts the app itself if it is not running, so an agent never has to ask a human to open something first.
{
"mcpServers": {
"custom-ai-view": {
"command": "node",
"args": ["<path>/mcp/server.js"]
}
}
}
In VS Code, Custom AI View: Show MCP Server Setup hands you that block with the path already filled in.
Clients — the protocol is the contract, not the vendor
Nothing here is a special case. The server implements the Model Context Protocol over stdio and declares its tools; whatever reads that declaration can drive the window. The names above are the clients this has been run against — not a list of what is allowed.
Agent skill
Tools tell an agent what it can call. They do not tell it when a screenshot is worth
taking, that the inspector beats guessing a selector, or that a device has to be set before a URL
is opened. skills/custom-ai-view/SKILL.md in the repository is that
second half — drop it in and the agent uses the tool the way someone who knows it would.
§ 04
All free, all the same engine underneath — the same frames, the same proxy, the same MCP server.
One file, about 82 MB. Run it and pin it to the taskbar — node scripts/make-launcher.js puts a shortcut with the icon on your desktop. Needs Chrome or Edge installed.
or all releases
A proper .app bundle, built on a Mac by the release workflow. Unzip it into /Applications and open it. Signed ad-hoc rather than notarised, so the first launch is right-click → Open.
A tab inside the editor, with the device tree in the sidebar. Download the .vsix from releases, then install it and reload the window.
code --install-extension custom-ai-view-<version>.vsix
Proprietary. © 2026 Custom AI. You may use it. You may not redistribute it, fork it, rebrand it, or present any part of it as your own — and that includes rewriting or porting it, because a translation is a derivative work. “Custom AI”, “Custom AI View” and the C mark are trademarks of Custom AI. The repository carries an AGENTS.md saying the same thing to any coding assistant that reads it.
For permission, write to contact@ccustom.ai.