could this just be an MCP server/ChatGPT plugin?

Good question! While it could be implemented as a ChatGPT plugin, OpenAstra offers some key advantages:

1. Visual Features - We maintain useful UI elements from traditional API tools (request/response viewers, environment management) within your chat responses. 2. Privacy & Control - You can self-host it and use any OpenAI-compatible LLM (including local models), keeping sensitive API traffic within your infrastructure

The core idea is to build a complete API discovery and testing platform that happens to use chat as its primary interaction model.