For various reasons, developing custom components in ServiceNow's Next Experience UI Framework has historically been harder than it should be. Whether it's out-of-date Horizon Design System components published to NPM, a lack of expertise in the community, or a lack of public examples of what a good component and project looks like, the struggle is real.
AI coding agents are an enticing solution to this, however they naturally suffer from the same problems that a human developer can experience: the need to understand the framework’s conventions, to know which platform components are available, and to work with the APIs those components actually expose.
That's why I built Next UI MCP – an MCP server that gives coding agents guidance and tools specifically for working with Next Experience UI Framework projects.
Think of it like enrolling your AI coding agent into a Next Experience UI Framework developer bootcamp, and giving it the best manual to follow with all the latest guidance and techniques.
Sounds good? Read on!
What Does It Do?
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, lets AI assistants use external tools and information. Next UI MCP connects an MCP-compatible coding assistant to framework guidance and component metadata from your live ServiceNow instance.
Instead of relying only on what the model learned during training, or the prompts you manually write for it, your coding agent can now:
- Discover existing platform components that exist on your live ServiceNow instance before building custom alternatives.
- Inspect real component APIs, including properties, events, and slots.
- Scaffold new components into a project with matching now-ui.json manifest entries.
- Find available icons on your live ServiceNow instance, rather than guessing or working from an old list.
The goal is to give the agent better evidence and help you spend less time correcting avoidable mistakes.
Storybook Local Preview Workflow
The framework guidance and scaffolds result in the use in your project of dylanlindgren/next-ui-storybook, a plugin I also created for the popular Storybook frontend workshop for building UI components in isolation. This helps your agent set up a workflow where you can see and iterate on components as you build them. It replaces the default snc ui-component develop command.
Watch The Demo
I’ve posted a few videos to YouTube showing Next UI MCP in action:
Try it in your project
You’ll need Node.js 18.20 or newer and an MCP-compatible coding assistant. On macOS, Next UI MCP can reuse a basic-auth profile configured through the snc CLI, so you don’t need to put credentials in your project configuration. Username/password and bearer-token authentication are also supported.
The GitHub repository (https://github.com/dylanlindgren/next-ui-mcp/) includes setup instructions in English and Japanese, plus example project instructions to encourage your agent to discover and inspect platform components before implementing UI.
If you try it, I’d love to hear what works, what needs improvement, and which workflows you’d like it to support next. Feedback and contributions are welcome!
NOTE: Next UI MCP is an unofficial, community-maintained project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by ServiceNow.
