wtf is optivibe-mcp?

Optivibe-mcp is an experimental MCP server that lets a coding agent, like Claude Code, control Zemax OpticStudio, which is professional software used to design optical systems such as lenses and camera systems. Instead of the agent writing raw code to talk to OpticStudio's API, this project wraps that interface in more than 80 typed tools covering loading designs, editing lens data, running analyses, optimizing designs, and tolerancing. Alongside those control tools, the project includes a separate reference layer the agent can query for grounding: lookups for optical operands and glass types, plus full text search over the OpticStudio manual. Every tool returns a consistent result object rather than throwing an error, so the agent is expected to check the returned value to confirm a call actually worked rather than assuming success just because nothing failed. This project ships as code only. It does not include any of Zemax's proprietary data, such as the glass catalog or manual text. Users generate that data themselves from their own licensed OpticStudio installation using build scripts included in the repository. Using this requires a fairly specific setup: Windows, since OpticStudio and its API are Windows-only, a licensed copy of OpticStudio (developed and tested against the 2025 R1 release), Python 3.11 or newer, and the .NET Framework, which the project configures automatically. After installing the two Python packages and building the local reference data, a user registers the server with Claude Code by pointing it at the right Python interpreter. The project also bundles a handful of Claude Code skills for tasks like reviewing a design against a specification, comparing two designs, running an optimization loop with monitoring, and troubleshooting connection or license errors. The author describes the project as experimental, tested against only one version of OpticStudio on Windows, with interfaces that may still change. It is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ansys or Zemax.