Will Barbee

Shidoka Studio is an MCP server I conceived, architected, and built. It’s internal to Kyndryl and is actively democratizing the prototyping and development of UIs across the org, used by engineers, designers, architects, PMs, and more.

AI agents in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, and GitHub Copilot use it to scaffold components and assemble pages from the Shidoka Design System’s custom-elements.json and Storybook patterns.

Building a UI, dashboard, or web application with it takes dramatically less time and fewer tokens. I’ve continued to refactor it to minimize direct tool calls and to use mounted web components whenever possible, while providing an ejectable path.

The expensive model does the thinking; cheap models do the rest. An orchestrator on the most capable model plans the work, writes the briefs, and signs off. Six specialized workers handle everything else, each on the cheapest model that can do the job: scouts and test runners on the smallest, implementers a tier up, and an independent verifier that checks anything risky before it’s called done. Every worker gets acceptance criteria and must return evidence, and the lessons from each run feed the next.

I run it at Kyndryl and on my own projects, and I’m still tuning it. I’ve shared the setup across the org and trained colleagues on it to bring token usage down.