Five production trackers, one contract — a tracker-MCP quintet and a hub

Production trackers don't talk to each other. ShotGrid, ftrack, Kitsu, AYON and NIM each hold the same kind of data — projects, shots, assets, tasks, statuses, casting — behind five incompatible APIs, and moving a show from one to another is a manual, lossy slog. I built an MCP for each, and a hub on top. tracker-mcp-hub.

The trick is one shared shape. Every tracker MCP emits the same normalized snapshot — project_summary — so an agent reads a project out of ShotGrid and recreates it in Kitsu without knowing either SDK. Five standalone servers, published and credited separately, all speaking one contract. A sixth tracker is just one more MCP that emits the same shape; everything downstream then works on it for free.

The hub is where that uniform contract pays off. It does five things no single tracker can: verify (diff two snapshots), audit (one source of truth against many mirrors), rollup (totals across every production), snapshot (a portable versioned archive), and migrate (an orchestrated read → write → verify that ends with proof). Most of it is pure — verify, audit, rollup and snapshot never touch a tracker SDK, they just operate on the normalized JSON. Only migrate does any writing.

The hub found real drift on its own the first time I aimed it at one project copied into all three original trackers. The ftrack copy came back short 8 tasks, carrying 615 status mismatches and 357 casting mismatches, plus name-collision assets ftrack had silently created. Every one of those is a documented cross-tracker incompatibility, surfaced by diffing snapshots instead of by hand. And an orchestrated migrate of a slice ended with VERIFY: PASS — every count matched.

Write safety was non-negotiable, since these point at real production databases. Every create, update, delete and status change takes a two-level dry run — a client-side plan, or a preflight that resolves references against live data, validates statuses against the schema, and returns a before→after diff while writing nothing. The whole thing is v0.1 and honest about its edges: the migrate reference copies structure, statuses and casting, and reports any media gap rather than pretending to move the heavy publish bytes.