matchcn is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of shadcn, any of the registries it indexes, or classifier.dev/TypeSafe.

What it is

Hundreds of registries now publish components in the shadcn registry.json format, and npx shadcn add can install from any of them. No developer or coding agent can hold that many registries in context, and existing directory tools only search component names, which does not help when you know what you need but not what any given registry decided to call it. matchcn tags every component across a fixed set of properties (category, motion, visual density, interaction model, and two others) using classifier.dev, then matches a plain-language brief against those tags with deterministic code, so the same brief always ranks the same way.

Status: early, read this before using it

This is a 2-3 day MVP covering 11 of the 372+ registries shadcn's own public list currently has. It is not a comprehensive index. Specific, known weak points, in order of how much they matter:

aceternity's page-template demo pages are 95.9% paywalled, found late. Aceternity was one of the original six registries, tagged before per-item availability checking existed at all; that check was only built later, specifically for shadcn-dashboard and shadcnblocks, and was never run against the original six until real-world use surfaced a confident match (masonry-bento-grid-with-images) whose install command actually required Aceternity Pro. A full-scale check (not a sample) found 163 of aceternity's 282 tagged components (57.8% overall) return HTTP 401 "Unauthorized" at their real install URL: 163 of 170 registry:block page-template demo pages (95.9%), while all 112 registry:ui primitives are free. The 163 gated page-templates are excluded from shipping; the full 282 remain tagged and preserved, not lost, same as shadcnblocks below.
shadcnblocks is not indexed, despite being tagged. A real per-item availability check (does npx shadcn add actually work unauthenticated, not just what the index claims) found roughly half of its components return 401/403 "License required" at their real install URL, something invisible in the registry's own index data. shadcn-dashboard had the same problem at a smaller scale (32.5%) and was fixed by filtering the paywalled components out before shipping; shadcnblocks' own full-scale check got contaminated by the vendor's rate limiter partway through (see docs/ROADMAP.md for the full account) before a clean filter could be produced, so it was pulled entirely rather than ship it unfiltered or filter it against bad data. Its tagged data is preserved, not lost, and it is expected back once a clean check runs.
visual_density is the weakest tagged dimension. 36% of pilot answers on this dimension score under 0.6 confidence, the worst of the six tagged dimensions, even after a rewrite. A confidence-weighted matcher discounts weak tags automatically, but a visual_density-heavy brief is still the most likely to disappoint. Full numbers: docs/PILOT_REPORT.md, docs/DIMENSIONS.md.
Catalog-wide, 24.4% of choice-dimension answers (category, motion, visual_density, interaction_model) score under 0.6 confidence, across the 1,783 components shipped as of the first product-UI expansion. Close to the original 23.9% baseline at the 1,069-component size; assistant-ui pulls this up, and shadcn-dashboard's paywall filtering has no effect on tag confidence either way, see below. This has not yet been recomputed for cnippet and uiable (added after this measurement; the catalog is now 3,717 components after also correcting aceternity's paywall exclusion below); a 20-item category-only sample taken during cnippet/uiable's pre-tagging recon scored 35% under 0.6 confidence, higher than this baseline, not yet confirmed at full scale.
assistant-ui: 37.0% of its choice-dimension answers land under 0.6 confidence, worse than aceternity's 28.7% on every single dimension. It is now the lowest-confidence registry in the catalog. Likely cause: its content (agent and chat UI: tool timelines, trace waterfalls, reasoning panels) is further from the schema's original motion/marketing anchors than any other registry. In practice, this means chat- and agent-UI briefs (tool timelines, reasoning panels) are more likely to return shortlist or no_match than a confident pick, even when a relevant assistant-ui component exists and ranks near the top by text similarity, because its underlying dimension tags carry low confidence.
Non-English briefs are known to be weaker, confirmed on 3 Polish test briefs, not fixed. A Polish pricing brief and its English equivalent were compared directly: English found a real, well-tagged pricing component at 0.98 confidence, Polish returned no match at all. A zero-cost fix was tried (an explicit "interpret by meaning, any language" line added to the tagging/matching criteria) and tested properly with a before/after comparison on 3 Polish briefs: it did not help the pricing brief, made a cursor brief measurably worse (a confident shortlist of 3 real candidates became no match), and left a bento grid brief unchanged. It was reverted rather than kept for no measured benefit. Non-English input should not be assumed to work. Details: docs/DECISIONS.md #17.
7 of aceternity's page-template demo pages are tagged from short index descriptions only, not enriched from source. Their per-item source endpoint returns HTTP 401 for anonymous requests. This turned out to correlate almost entirely with the Aceternity Pro paywall above: of the original 170 registry:block page-templates, 163 hit this same 401 and are the ones excluded as paywalled; those 163 were never enriched (21-27 characters of tagging text each). The 7 that actually ship were enriched successfully from real source (1,595-8,043 characters each), so this limitation applies only to those 7, not to the page-template catalog as a whole. aceternity's 112 registry:ui primitives do not have this problem and are enriched from real source. Details: docs/DECISIONS.md #12.
cult-ui.com is not indexed at all. Its registry.json sits behind a Vercel bot challenge that a plain HTTP request cannot pass. Details: docs/DECISIONS.md #6.

None of these cause a wrong forced answer: when confidence is genuinely low, pick_component returns a shortlist or an explicit no-match, never a single silent guess. See docs/DEMO_REPORT.md for real examples of all three outcomes, including two briefs designed to fail.

Install

npx matchcn

MCP setup

Add to your MCP client's config (for example Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json, or Claude Code's .mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "matchcn": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "matchcn"]
    }
  }
}

This exposes one tool, pick_component(brief, registry?, maxResults?).

Worked example

$ pnpm demo

Brief: a dense bento grid for a landing page. This is real output from a real run. classifier.dev does not guarantee identical answers across calls, so the exact confidence number will vary between runs (0.79 to 0.98 observed across repeated runs during development); the outcome, the chosen component, and the install command have been stable across every run tried.

BRIEF: a dense bento grid for a landing page
----------------------------------------------------------------------
OUTCOME: CONFIDENT
Selected "bento-grid" from magicui.

  -> bento-grid  (magicui)  confidence 0.85
    install: npx shadcn@latest add https://magicui.design/r/bento-grid.json
    matched:     category, motion, visual_density, interaction_model, needs_external_data, decorative_only
    not matched: (none)

resolve used: true   decisions spent: 7

Every response includes a per-dimension reason (which of the six tagged dimensions matched the brief and which did not), never just a name. Full JSON shape and more examples, including a shortlist and two deliberate no-match cases: docs/DEMO_REPORT.md.

How it works

Five stages: Ingest, Tag, Match, Resolve, Surface. Tagging runs ahead of time and is committed as reviewable JSON (data/tags/); matching at query time is deterministic code, not a model call, so the same brief always ranks the same way. Full architecture, every design decision and its rejected alternatives, and the exact tagging criteria used:

docs/WHY.md: the problem, who this is for, what it explicitly is not
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: the five stages and the data flow
docs/DIMENSIONS.md: the tag schema, every dimension's exact criteria
docs/DECISIONS.md: numbered decision records, alternatives rejected and why
docs/ROADMAP.md: what is shipped, what is deferred, what is parked
docs/PILOT_REPORT.md, docs/FULL_RUN_REPORT.md, docs/DEMO_REPORT.md: real numbers from real runs
RECON.md, docs/FILTER_REPORT.md: what was fetched and what was filtered out, with evidence

Registries indexed, and attribution

matchcn stores only derived tags (category, motion, density, and so on) and a link back to each registry's own install command. It never copies, stores, or redistributes any registry's component source code. Every component you install still comes directly from its own registry via npx shadcn add <url>.

registry	homepage	components indexed
react-bits	reactbits.dev	204
magicui	magicui.design	79
aceternity	ui.aceternity.com	119
kokonutui	kokonutui.com	51
animate-ui	animate-ui.com	420
motion-primitives	motion-primitives.com	33
shadcn-dashboard	shadcndashboard.dev	343
assistant-ui	assistant-ui.com	154
bundui	bundui.io	217
cnippet	ui.cnippet.dev	1128
uiable	uiable.com	969

3,717 components total, drawn from the eleven registries above (343 of shadcn-dashboard's 508 tagged components ship, the other 165 filtered out as paywalled; 119 of aceternity's 282 tagged components ship, the other 163 filtered out as paywalled; see the limitations section above for both). The first six are the motion/marketing family from the original MVP; the rest are a product-UI expansion (forms, tables, dashboards, data display) added after per-registry filter verification, see docs/REGISTRY_EXPANSION_STEP1_2.md. Three other product-UI candidates (shadcn-ui-blocks, plate, react-aria) were evaluated and excluded for specific, evidenced filter gaps; shadcnblocks was tagged but is not currently shipped, both tracked in docs/ROADMAP.md. cnippet and uiable were added in a second product-UI expansion; two other candidates from that same recon, shadcnuikit and shadcn-space, were evaluated and excluded after a real per-item availability check found genuine paywalls on 40% and 33.3% of a 30-item sample respectively. uiable's descriptions are largely name-echo templates ("X component.") rather than hand-written text, a known limitation for that registry, shipped as is rather than blocked on. Tagging runs through classifier.dev, a free, keyless classification endpoint backed by TypeSafe's Jev decision model.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm ingest      # fetch and normalize all registries
pnpm tag         # tag all components via classifier.dev
pnpm demo        # run 3 briefs end to end
pnpm test        # determinism tests for the matcher
pnpm typecheck