Back in September 2025, Automattic posted what sounded like a final word on the Simplenote forum: no active development, no new features planned, just minimal maintenance to keep the lights on. The thread was locked to replies.

Seven months later, on April 15, the official blog announces a beta MCP server.

The server, available on GitHub under the Automattic account, lets any AI tool compatible with the MCP protocol, like Claude or Codex, query your notes in natural language. There are four exposed tools: list_tags to list tags, list_notes to get recent notes with tag filtering, search_notes to search by content or title, and get_note to retrieve the full text of a specific note.

How it works

The server reads Simplenote data locally and is completely read-only, meaning it won’t modify or delete anything. For now it only works on macOS and requires manual installation in whichever AI app you’re using. Windows support is listed as coming next.

The practical value is being able to ask the model things like “show me notes with the recipe tag” or “find everything related to project X”, letting it synthesize or organize the results without opening the app.

New features from a project supposedly done developing

The interesting bit isn’t really the MCP server itself, but the context around it. That September 2025 announcement read like a technical sendoff: no active development, no new features. Yet someone at Automattic worked on this, shipped it, and wrote a blog post about it.

Maybe it’s a side project one developer pushed through in spare time. Maybe internal direction shifted quietly without telling users. Either way, the messaging has been muddled at best: you declare development over and then release new code. For anyone already looking at alternatives, the takeaway remains unchanged: Simplenote has no public roadmap and no clear long-term vision.

The MCP server is available at github.com/Automattic/simplenote-mcp.