Pancake Stack › Pancake Stack Manual

Ask Pancake about your sites in plain words and let it do things for you, on Apple Intelligence or an AI of your choice, and connect Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Claude Desktop.

14.1Asking the Assistant

Open the Assistant pane, type a question in Ask Pancake… and press ⌘Return. Try:

• "Which sites do I have?"
• "Why is my blog showing an error?" (it reads the site's PHP and web server logs)
• "Start Pancake"
• "Make a PHP site called shop"
• "How do I put a site at my own domain?" (it answers from Pancake's Help)

When the Assistant uses one of Pancake's tools, the chat says so ("Used sites list"). Clear starts a new conversation.

14.2Where the answers come from

The line under the pane's title always says which AI is answering.

Apple Intelligence on this Mac (the default)

Free, private and offline: nothing leaves your Mac. It needs a Mac with Apple silicon and Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings. It works best with short, specific questions.

Private Cloud Compute

Apple's larger model, for longer requests and every tool. Requests are processed privately and never stored. It needs macOS 27 or later and has a daily limit per Apple Account; the pane says when you're close to it.

A cloud AI provider

Your own key for Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenRouter, or VibeProxy on this Mac, which uses the Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini subscriptions you've connected in it, with no key. Off unless you switch it on.

To choose, turn on Advanced in the Assistant pane. Pick On this Mac (private, offline) or Private Cloud Compute, or turn on Send requests to a cloud AI provider, choose the Provider and Model, paste your API key and click Save (Get a key opens the provider's page).

If you use KeyRotate, keys can come from it, and a key you type into Pancake is handed to it. See Keys and KeyRotate.

14.3Look only, or allow changes

At the end of the Assistant pane's Advanced settings, choose what the Assistant and connected AI tools may do:

• Look only (the default): read sites, settings and logs. Nothing changes.
• Allow changes: also start and stop, create sites, put them online, deploy, and write site files.

Turning Outside Access off is always allowed, because it only takes sites off the internet. Every tool call is written to assistant.log (in the Logs window), with who made it.

14.4Connecting Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Claude Desktop

Pancake's MCP server lets AI coding tools on this Mac use the same tools as the Assistant: list your sites, read logs, start the servers, create a site, design a page, deploy. It listens on this Mac only, at http://127.0.0.1:19810/mcp, and every request needs a token.

1. In the Assistant pane (Advanced), switch on MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop.
2. Click Connect a Client… and choose your tool.
3. Click Copy and paste the configuration where Pancake says. It includes your token.

Claude Code

Run the copied command in Terminal: claude mcp add --transport http pancake http://127.0.0.1:19810/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer …"

Cursor

Add the copied pancake entry to ~/.cursor/mcp.json.

Codex

Add the copied [mcp_servers.pancake] section to ~/.codex/config.toml.

Claude Desktop

Choose Claude ▸ Settings ▸ Developer ▸ Edit Config and add the copied entry. It runs a small helper inside Pancake that connects to the server.

What the tools may do follows the Look only / Allow changes choice. New Token… replaces the token; every connected tool stops working until you paste the new configuration.

14.5The tools