On Monday April 20th, I went to Heartland Bike Share’s Free Rides announcement in my capacity as a board member of ROAM Share, the non-profit that operates HBS. I saw tons of friends from my time in bike sharing including more than a few that I hadn’t seen in more than five years. It was awesome in so many ways that go well beyond the scope of this post, but my AI-pilled Product Manager brain also came to the bike share event and it had some intrusive thoughts.

There has been a lot of chatter about Salesforce going headless lately and all of this got swirling in my head leading me to wonder: what would the BCycle ecosystem look like if operators could “give your coding agent complete, live access to your entire platform, including all of your data, workflows, and business logic, directly in the coding agents you already use?” I bet it would look super cool.

When I was on the Operators Advisory Group in 2018, I spent more time than was likely appreciated advocating for BCycle to open up their API to allow integration into whatever local transit app is popular in your community so that with one app you could get on the bus, check out a bike share bike, pay for parking, what have you. But in today’s world, full access to the BCycle API via an MCP would enable so much innovation from operators than I could have dream of back then.

In my experience, some of the most clever problem solvers I ever met work in Operations in Bike Share. AI Harnesses and LLMs have enabled such creative problem solving in my own life, I’m confident every operations team has a nagging problem that they could solve using Claude Code and a BCycle MCP.

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