Check the status of your CircleCI pipeline without leaving your IDE

Waiting on CI is one thing. Keeping tabs on it without breaking focus is another.

Most developers track build progress by opening the CircleCI UI, navigating to the project, and digging through pipelines to find the latest run for a specific branch. It’s not hard, but it pulls you out of flow. Especially when you’re doing it multiple times a day across projects.

This post shows how to check the status of your most recent pipeline directly from your IDE using the get_latest_pipeline_status tool in the CircleCI MCP Server. You’ll type a simple prompt like:

what’s the status of the latest pipeline for main?

The assistant returns a clear, timestamped summary of the latest pipeline so you can quickly verify build progress without leaving your editor.

Why this is useful

Quick access to CI status sounds small, but in practice it reduces friction at key points in your day. Here are a few common situations where this tool helps:

• You just pushed a change and want to know if it passed without switching tabs
• You’re helping a teammate debug their branch and want to see if their latest pipeline failed
• You’re reviewing a flaky test fix and want to verify multiple runs in a row
• You’re working across several services and need to confirm pipeline activity in each repo
• You’ve triggered a pipeline manually and want to check when it completes

In all these scenarios and more, it can be difficult to stay in flow while keeping tabs on progress. This tool gives you the information you need while keeping your editor in focus.

It also pairs well with other MCP tools like get_build_failure_logs, run_pipeline, and find_flaky_tests, allowing you to follow up directly from the same chat thread.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• A CircleCI account
• A GitHub account
• Node.js 18 or later
• An IDE that supports the CircleCI MCP Server (like Cursor)

Next, you’ll configure your IDE and connect the assistant to CircleCI using your API token.

Preparing your environment

To let your IDE assistant access CircleCI data, you’ll need to authorize it.

First, log in to CircleCI and generate a personal API token from User Settings > Personal API Tokens. This token allows the MCP Server to query your projects securely.

Save the token, then configure your IDE to connect to the MCP server. During setup, you’ll enter the token to give the assistant access to your build data.

Once connected, your assistant can check pipeline status, inspect workflows, and follow up on failures without leaving your editor.

Step 1: Set up a project (or use one you already follow)

To try this out, you can clone a sample repo from our MCP cookbook, which includes a working pipeline configuration file. Push the project to GitHub and create a new CircleCI project named get-latest-pipeline-status.

If you already follow one or more projects in CircleCI, you can use those instead. The tool will work with any followed project across GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

To check which projects you’re following, you can either go to the Projects page in the CircleCI web app or use the list_followed_projects tool in your IDE.

Since this tutorial is about getting the information you need without leaving the context of your code editor, we’ll use the MCP server to list our followed projects.

Step 2: Select a project in your IDE

Open the AI assistant in your IDE and type:

list my CircleCI projects

This will return a list of all the projects you follow, along with their projectSlug identifiers. Choose the one you want to work with:

select the get-latest-pipeline-status project

Once selected, this context stays active for future tool calls. You won’t need to repeat it.

Step 3: Get the latest pipeline status

If this is a new project and you haven’t run a pipeline yet, you can trigger one by typing:

run a pipeline for the main branch

This uses the run_pipeline tool to start a build directly from your IDE. For more details, see Trigger CircleCI pipelines with natural language.

Then, to check the status of your selected project’s pipeline, just ask:

what’s the status of the latest pipeline for the main branch?

The assistant will call the get_latest_pipeline_status tool and return a detailed summary. You’ll see the pipeline number, when it was triggered, and a breakdown of each workflow including status, duration, and stop time.

If one or more workflows failed, the assistant will offer contextual next steps, such as:

• Get the build failure logs to see what caused the issue
• Check test results to identify which tests failed
• Look for flaky tests in this project

This lets you go from visibility to action immediately, without switching to a browser or searching through the CircleCI dashboard.

Step 4: Follow up or branch out

Once you’ve reviewed the pipeline status, you can take action without changing context or re-entering project details. The assistant remembers your selected project, so every tool call that follows is already scoped correctly.

For example, if you see that the test workflow failed, you can immediately ask the assistant to retrieve the logs. That might reveal a failed assertion, a misconfigured environment, or a missing dependency.

If the failure looks like a one-off issue, you can rerun the workflow directly:

rerun the last workflow

And if failures have been inconsistent, you can begin debugging:

find flaky tests in this project

The assistant will return any flaky tests identified by CircleCI’s native detection system, so you can see if failures are consistent or intermittent.

Conclusion

The ability to check pipeline status directly from your IDE may sound like a minor convenience. But when it saves you and your team repeated context switches and makes next steps obvious, those time savings add up—especially when paired with the rest of the MCP toolkit.

When CI feedback is accessible in the same place you write and review code, it becomes part of your workflow instead of a distraction from it.

You can get started by signing up for a free CircleCI account and connecting your IDE to the MCP Server. Once set up, your assistant will have access to all your CI pipelines and can surface the information you need, right when you need it.