Plain Sight

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Version: 1.1.0

An AI says what it sees. Generative image describer — MCP server + CLI wrapping Florence-2 (MIT) for prose descriptions, OCR, and LoRA-dataset caption sidecars. Runs locally, deterministic against a pinned model revision.

The sibling of ai-eyes-mcp:

	ai-eyes-mcp	plain-sight
Job	judges images	describes images
Model	SigLIP2 (discriminative)	Florence-2 (generative)
Output	calibrated scores	prose / OCR / caption files
Failure mode	can't narrate	can hallucinate detail
Reach for it when	"does this image contain X?"	"what is in this image?"

Honesty contract

Descriptions are generative: fluent, usually accurate, and capable of inventing detail. plain-sight makes output reproducible — deterministic decoding against a pinned model revision, so the same image yields the same caption — not guaranteed true. For verifying a specific claim about an image, use ai-eyes-mcp's image_verify; it measures, it doesn't narrate. The two tools are different model families by design, so one can check the other.

Three specific limits, stated because they are easy to discover the hard way:

• OCR cannot report the absence of text. Florence-2 emits a decoded string for every image, including images containing no text at all — a photograph may return '2'. That output is lexically indistinguishable from a correct reading of a numeral. Every OCR result therefore carries absence_of_text_unreliable: true (MCP) or a [OCR_CAVEAT] line on stderr (CLI). plain-sight never suppresses or empties the result, because a short reading may be genuine — it tells you the signal does not exist.
• Captions describe; they do not verify. A confident sentence about an image is not evidence the thing described is present.
• Reproducibility is per-revision. Pinning is what makes the determinism claim meaningful across time; see Provenance.

Tools (MCP)

Tool	What it does
describe_image	One image → prose description (3 detail tiers)
describe_batch	N images → .txt caption sidecars (the dataset lane)
read_text	OCR — decode text from an image, with an absence caveat
sight_status	Health check: model, device, resolved revision, loaded state
sight_selftest	Describe bundled reference images, sanity-check output

Every payload that carries model output also carries model_id and revision_resolved — see Provenance.

Quick Start

pip install -e .
plain-sight-mcp   # starts the STDIO MCP server

Or run as a module: python -m plain_sight

CLI

# One image, full paragraph
plain-sight describe hero.png

# One short sentence
plain-sight describe hero.png --detail low

# OCR (the absence caveat goes to stderr; the text goes to stdout)
plain-sight ocr screenshot.png

# See the plan before writing anything — no model load, no files
plain-sight batch ./dataset --prefix "mcpt_style, " --dry-run

# The dataset lane: caption a directory into .txt sidecars with a trigger token
plain-sight batch ./dataset --prefix "mcpt_style, " --detail high

# Record provenance for the run alongside it
plain-sight batch ./dataset --prefix "mcpt_style, " --manifest ./dataset-run.json

# Re-runs are idempotent — existing sidecars are skipped unless you --overwrite
plain-sight batch ./dataset --prefix "mcpt_style, " --overwrite

batch flags: --detail · --prefix · --suffix · --out-dir · --overwrite · --max-new-tokens · --manifest · --dry-run. Run plain-sight batch --help for the full text; plain-sight --help documents exit codes and which stream carries what.

What a long run looks like

Progress goes to stderr; results go to stdout, so plain-sight describe x.png > caption.txt works.

plain-sight: loading florence-community/Florence-2-large rev=4271c66b…  caption=4820 skip=0
  (first caption includes model load, ~10s; first-ever run downloads ~1.5 GB)
[1/4820] wrote img_0001.txt
[heartbeat] 1840/4820 written=1801 skipped=32 failed=7  1.4 img/s  ETA 35m

The load is announced before work begins, with the count of images that will actually be captioned, so a pause never appears mid-run. Skipped images are counted on the heartbeat rather than printed one line each — a re-run over a finished set is quiet. Failures stay one line each.

Claude Code config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "plain-sight": {
      "command": "plain-sight-mcp",
      "env": {
        "PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_DIR": "/path/to/model/cache"
      }
    }
  }
}

The caption contract (dataset lane)

Built for LoRA training sets (style-dataset-lab and friends):

• Exact basename pairing: img_0042.png → img_0042.txt. No counter suffix — unlike ComfyUI's SaveText node, which appends _00001.
• Bare concatenation: the sidecar contains prefix + caption + suffix with no delimiter injected. Want "mcpt_style, <caption>"? Put the comma-space in the prefix.
• Colliding stems are refused, never merged. Two images whose stems match — img.png and img.jpg in one folder, or same-stem files from two folders under one --out-dir — would claim a single .txt. plain-sight refuses the whole batch before loading the model, names the offenders, and exits 1. It will not rename a sidecar to dodge the clash: trainers pair by exact stem, so a rename would orphan the caption and leave the image uncaptioned.
• Writes are atomic. Each sidecar is written to a temp file in the same directory and moved into place, so an interrupt never leaves a partial caption at the final path. A sidecar that exists but is empty is treated as unfinished and re-captioned.
• Idempotent re-runs: existing non-empty sidecars are skipped, and cost nothing, unless --overwrite / overwrite=true.
• Deterministic: do_sample=false + beam search against a pinned revision — re-captioning an unchanged image reproduces the same text, so diffs mean something.

Provenance

The dataset lane produces training data. Six months on, the question is which weights produced which captions — so the answer travels with the output.

• The model revision is pinned by default to 4271c66b88cdbc05735372ec13b2360108de5317. Without a pin, HuggingFace resolves to whatever the repository's default branch currently points at, and a silent retag would change captions under unchanged inputs. Override with PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_REVISION.
• Every output payload names the weights. describe_image, read_text, describe_batch, sight_selftest, and the CLI's --json modes and batch summary all carry model_id and revision_resolved — the revision the loaded model actually reports, not the constant that was requested. sight_status reports both, so a mismatch is visible.
• --manifest PATH writes a run record — tool version, model id, requested and resolved revision, device, dtype, detail tier, prefix/suffix, per-image results and counts. Opt-in and never inferred: no manifest is written unless you pass a path, and a path that collides with a computed sidecar is refused. It contains a timestamp, so unlike the captions it is not byte-reproducible.

Detail tiers

Florence-2's native task ladder:

Tier	Task token	Output
low	<CAPTION>	one short sentence
medium	<DETAILED_CAPTION>	a few sentences
high (default)	<MORE_DETAILED_CAPTION>	a full paragraph

high is a paragraph, not an essay — Florence-2 is a compact (0.77B) model. Its edge is throughput and license, not art-critic depth. If a caption looks truncated, raise max_new_tokens (default 1024, max 4096).

Configuration

Env Var	Default	Purpose
PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_ID	florence-community/Florence-2-large	HuggingFace model
PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_REVISION	4271c66b… (pinned)	Model revision; the mechanism behind the reproducibility claim
PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_DIR	HF default cache	Model cache directory
PLAIN_SIGHT_DEVICE	auto (cuda if available, else cpu)	torch device
PLAIN_SIGHT_DTYPE	float16 on CUDA, full precision on CPU	float16 / bfloat16 / float32
PLAIN_SIGHT_MAX_NEW_TOKENS	1024	Default generation cap
PLAIN_SIGHT_NUM_BEAMS	3	Beam width (deterministic decoding)
PLAIN_SIGHT_LOG_LEVEL	WARNING	DEBUG / INFO / WARNING / ERROR
PLAIN_SIGHT_EAGER_LOAD	unset	If truthy, load the model at server start

Logging: stderr only (stdout is the MCP protocol channel), logger name plain_sight. PLAIN_SIGHT_LOG_LEVEL is honoured on both surfaces.

Eager load: with PLAIN_SIGHT_EAGER_LOAD truthy, the MCP server loads at start rather than on first call. A failure there never kills the server import — it is reported by sight_status as eager_load_error and raised as a ToolError on the first tool call that needs the model.

First call: the model loads lazily by default — the first describe/OCR call loads Florence-2 (~10–20s on GPU; the first-ever call downloads ~1.5 GB). Subsequent calls are ~1–2s per image at high detail on a modern GPU.

License posture

• This tool: MIT.
• The model: pinned to florence-community/Florence-2-large — the official native-transformers conversion of Microsoft's Florence-2 release. MIT (hub license tag verified 2026-08-19). Commercial use clean.
• Why not microsoft/Florence-2-large? Same weights, same MIT license, but the original repos ship pre-native configs that only load via trust_remote_code — which this tool refuses on principle. The community conversion loads with transformers' built-in Florence-2 classes.
• Deliberately not offered: the Florence-2 fine-tune zoo (MiaoshouAI PromptGen, CogFlorence, SD3/Flux captioners, Castollux). Their licenses are unverified; they stay out until cleared. Overriding PLAIN_SIGHT_MODEL_ID to one of them is possible but puts the license question on you.
• No remote code: the engine uses transformers' native Florence-2 support only — trust_remote_code is never passed, so no hub-fetched Python ever executes. This requires transformers >= 4.51.

Security and Trust

This tool operates locally only.

• Data touched: local image files (read-only); the HuggingFace model cache (written once on first download); and the files it writes — .txt caption sidecars, only where the caller asked (out_dir or next to the image), plus one JSON manifest if and only if --manifest / manifest_path supplies an explicit path. Existing sidecars are replaced only under explicit --overwrite.
• No network egress at runtime — the model downloads once on first use, then all inference is local.
• No remote code execution — native transformers classes only; trust_remote_code is never passed, so no hub-fetched Python ever executes.
• No secrets handling, no telemetry — nothing is read from or sent anywhere.
• Structured errors only — raw stack traces never reach MCP clients or CLI users. CLI exit codes: 0 ok · 1 user error · 2 runtime error · 3 partial success.

Full policy: SECURITY.md. Actively maintained; supported versions listed there.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.10
• transformers >= 4.51 (native Florence-2)
• CUDA GPU recommended (~2 GB VRAM at FP16); CPU fallback works (slower)
• Model downloads ~1.5 GB on first use

Development

# Install in editable mode with dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# CI-safe suite (no model, no GPU) — this is what CI runs
pytest -m "not dogfood" -v

# Dogfood suite (real model + GPU, local only)
pytest -m dogfood -v

# Everything
pytest

# Full verify: imports, MCP tool surface, CI-safe tests, wheel + sdist build
bash verify.sh

Tests select by marker, not by filename, so a new CI-safe test file is picked up without touching CI. On Windows, a stale reparse point in the shared system temp can break pytest's default temp root; verify.sh relocates it via PYTEST_DEBUG_TEMPROOT, and pythonpath = ["."] keeps the console script and python -m pytest in agreement.

Architecture

engine.py    Standalone Florence-2 wrapper — no MCP dependency.
             Lazy-loads the model; validation runs BEFORE the load.
             Owns the provenance stamp and the shared logging setup.
             Importable directly: from plain_sight.engine import Florence2Engine

sidecars.py  The training-data contract, pure stdlib: basename pairing,
             bare concatenation, collision detection, atomic writes,
             directory expansion. Testable without torch.

server.py    FastMCP wrapper exposing engine methods as MCP tools.
             Thin layer: validation, error shaping, tool metadata.

cli.py       argparse CLI over the same engine (describe / ocr / batch /
             status / selftest). Structured errors, meaningful exit codes.

The architecture is borrowed deliberately from ai-eyes-mcp — same engine/server split, same error shaping, same selftest pattern. A cloud sibling of the same contract runs on Comfy Cloud as the caption-florence2-v1 workflow (one-image-per-job metadata rider; this tool is the bulk lane).

License

MIT

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