thamer

You can think of an MCP server as a process exposing some tools. It runs on your machine communicating via stdin/stdout, or on a server over HTTP. It exposes a list of tools, each tool has a name and named+typed parameters, just like a list of functions in a program. When you "add" an MCP server to Claude Code or any other client, you simply tell this client app on your machine about this list of tools and it will include this list in its requests to the LLM alongside your prompt.

When the LLM receives your prompt and decides that one of the tools listed alongside would be helpful to answer you, it doesn't return a regular response to your client but a "tool call" message saying: "call <this tool> with <these parameters>". Your client does this, and sends back the tool call result to the LLM, which will take this into account to respond to your prompt.

That's pretty much all there is to it: LLMs can't connect to your email or your GitHub account or anything else; your local apps can. MCP is just a way for LLMs to ask clients to call tools and provide the response.

1. You: {message: "hey Claude, how many PRs are open on my GitHub repo foo/bar?", tools: [... github__pr_list(org:string, repo:string) -> [PullRequest], ...] } 2. Anthropic API: {tool_use: {id: 123, name: github__pr_list, input:{org: foo, repo: bar}}} 3. You: {tool_result: {id: 123, content: [list of PRs in JSON]} } 4. Anthropic API: {message: "I see 3 PRs in your repo foo/bar"}

that's it.

If you want to go deeper the MCP website[1] is relatively accessible, although you definitely don't need to know all the details of the protocol to use MCP. If all you need is to use MCP servers and not blow up your context with a massive list of tools that are included with each prompt, I don't think you need to know much more than what I described above.

The two are kind of similar if I remember correctly, and both offer a lot of config options to change the style and more. I mostly use it for diffs involving long lines since it highlights changes within a line, which makes it easier to spot such edits.

I have an alias set in `~/.gitconfig` to pipe the output of `git diff` (with options) to `diff-so-fancy` with `git diffs`:

    diffs = "!f() { git diff $@ | diff-so-fancy; }; f"

The associated paper[2] goes into a lot more detail, and includes interactive features that help illustrate how the model "thinks" ahead of time.

There's also this new effort by Anthropic to provide a packaging system for MCP servers, called MCPB or MCP Bundles[1]. A bundle is a zip file with a manifest inside it, a bit like how Chrome extensions are structured (maybe VSCode extensions too?).

Is this something you're looking to integrate with? I can't say I have seen any MCPB files anywhere just yet, but with a focus on simple installs and given that Anthropic introduced MCP in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised if this new format also got some traction. These archives could contain a lot more data than the small amount you're currently encoding in the URL though[2].