As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been doing a lot of exploring with Claude for work and play. One of the things I’ve been trying to sort out is my MCP usage. Lots of MCPs (and the tools underneath it) aren’t necessarily a problem, but they can throw a lot of needless chatter into your context window. Claude has gotten better at not loading those all up front, but instead querying when they are needed, but still, lots of tools (particularly tools that overlap) can cause you to churn through tokens while the LLM tries to figure out what tool to use, how to use it, and then actually executing it.
I’m on a MacBook Pro, so a number of my MCPs are related to using tools on my Mac:
- Anthropic has created a connector (MCP) to Apple Notes. I’ve got a little over 1000 notes in Apple Notes, so it’s not always fast (it’s often very much not fast), but it’s nice to throw Claude a task of finding a note and pulling some info out of it to use in another place.
- Anthropic also has created a filesystem MCP to be able to do things to your files, which comes in handy if you’re making lots of changes.
- I do a lot of work in Drafts (which is where I’m typing this), and Claude being able to connect to Drafts via MCP means I can throw lots of things into Drafts and then ask Claude to act on them. Drafts also has a huge amount of capability, so you can get the double win of thinking of an idea, having Claude create that as a Drafts action, then having Claude orchestrate the whole thing so you don’t have to.
Those are all sort of blessed, first or third party connectors. Where I’ve gotten a lot of value is that Claude is now pretty good at creating MCPs, so if you need something, and you can think of a way to string it together, Claude might be able to make that possible for you. Here are some I’ve created (and one open-source one):
- I created an MCP to talk to my Stash (bookmarking) app and to my Concerts scraper. For the bookmarking app, it’s nice–if I remember the basics of an article, I can ask Claude to grab it, summarize it, or spit out a PDF version. My Concerts scraper is nice when used with the next MCP …
- There’s an open source Apple Music MCP that I’ve felt comfortable using (your mileage may vary). I’ve used it to do stuff like “take this list of 100 songs and add it to this playlist in my library” to some success (it added them to my library, but not to my playlist). But I’ve also used it to say “look at my favorite groups by # of 5 star songs, and then look to see if they have any upcoming concerts”. That actually worked! With an exception I’ll described in a bit …
- I’ve got some MCPs to connect to OmniFocus and to call Apple Shortcuts. There’s a bunch of them out there, these are the ones I use.
- One of the nicer ones (I think) is one I built. It’s basically one that says “do anything you can do via AppleScript, and then give it a name and cache it”. So once it uses it, it caches it. Then rather than creating a new script each time, it just grabs the already built job and runs it. Works pretty nicely for things like “figure out which days have the most free time” from your calendar, or “find all my unread emails”. Or, honestly, anything you can figure out how to do with AppleScript.
There’s some noise. And some places where the tooling is smart enough, but only if you tell it how to know it is wrong. In my “find concerts from 5 star artists”, it grabbed an MCP tool that it thought returned 5 star artists, but instead returned everything. So it churned through loads of data before I said “hey, I don’t have that many 5 star songs” – at which point I told it to show me what it found, and we figured out it couldn’t get the data it wanted from the Apple Music MCP.
Here’s where there was some magic – it jumped over to my AppleScript MCP, wrote the AppleScript, got the correct data back, and solved the problem. Really pretty remarkable, minus burning through a huge amount of my daily quota.