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A diagnostic session with the agent, start to finish

Written from a real one: a G20 with a charge-pressure fault, the agent driving ISTA+ on the garage laptop while the owner was at the car.

1. Kit

Item Notes
Windows laptop at the car Win 10/11, on mains if possible. Battery mode silently stops the helper tasks until setup() fixes the task settings.
ENET cable (or ICOM) OBD to RJ45. ISTA finds the car over it.
ISTA+ Installed and working by hand first. If you can't diagnose manually, the agent can't either.
Remote route Tailscale or similar into the laptop, SSH server on, desktop logged in.
This repo The MCP server on your Mac/PC, registered with your MCP client.

2. Before the first real session

Run, in order: diagnose(), setup(), calibrate(), read_state(). Calibration must say 5/5 hits and a matching capture size. If it doesn't, the causes in the README cover every one we hit: display scaling, battery, Defender, no desktop.

One ISTA-specific thing: ISTA may be set to run as administrator. Clicks from a non-elevated helper are then discarded by Windows and it looks like ISTA ignores them. The input task here runs elevated, so it works either way; ista_elevation("status") tells you the state and read_state() warns if it matters.

3. A real case: a charge-pressure fault

Symptom: a stored charge-pressure control fault.

What the agent did:

  1. read_state() with ISTA on the fault list. It read the codes as text and explained each one in plain English.
  2. Opened the relevant fault; read_doc() pulled BMW's description and the full test plan in one call, German translated.
  3. Looked the code up on the web for that engine, and reported where the community's experience agreed with BMW's plan and where it didn't.
  4. Walked the test plan one step at a time, asking the owner for each check, until it reached the component BMW's plan blamed.
  5. Component replaced. Fault cleared with a typed go, re-read: clean, and still clean on a full read the next day.

What it didn't do: it didn't guess. Where the plan asked for a measurement it couldn't take, it said so and waited. It didn't clear the fault until told to.

4. Gotchas we met

  • tempWebView.html is UTF-8 but arrives re-encoded if you read it naively over SSH. The helper decodes it properly; if you ever see mojibake, that's why.
  • Defender quarantines screen-capture scripts silently. setup() adds the exclusion for C:\ista-mcp. If capture returns nothing, diagnose() first.
  • Windows display scaling at 125% makes a DPI-unaware helper capture a crop and click 25% off. Fixed in the helpers, verified by calibrate().
  • On battery, scheduled tasks don't start. setup() clears that condition.
  • A hidden PowerShell still flashes a console and steals focus. Helpers run through a VBScript launcher with no window.
  • Every ISTA report and dialog is modal. Close it before the next action.
  • Hotspot links drop. If a tool call errors, check input.log before repeating.

5. What to try next

  • Guided test plans for other stored faults, one step at a time.
  • Service functions with a typed go: battery registration after a new battery, mic calibration, adaptation resets.
  • A "plug-in check": read faults on every connection, diff against last time, message you only if something new appears.

6. What this project will not do

Coding and programming with E-Sys. It was tried, it worked on our own car, and it was dropped from the public tool because E-Sys has no guardrails and a confident agent in front of an inexperienced user is how modules get bricked. If you need coding, learn E-Sys by hand first. The earlier work is on the esys branch, unsupported.