Note that Claude Desktop can be run on Linux using https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian, which repackages the Windows version to run on Linux (it's an Electron app, so it just needs to stub out the native interface, which seems mostly for cosmetic things).
It would be really nice though if the web versions of Claude, ChatGPT, etc. added MCP support directly: this should be achievable with help from a WebExtension and a native binary to proxy messages from the WebExtension to the MCP server.
It should also be possible to write such a WebExtension by a third-party (that injects messages in the conversation), although it's possible the LLM companies might block it.
It did require to manually enter "continue" in Claude's chat (and to approve the use of codemcp at the start), but it otherwise did everything automatically.
It seems to work.
codemcp automatically produces and commits a single git commit which also contains commit hashes for a bunch of other commits that contain a subset of the changes.
The issue I faced during MCP server development of my Kubernetes MCP server (https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-server-kubernetes) is that I wanted to be able to easily test changes to the server without having to deal with Claude Desktop. Realized that I could make a simple CLI client that lets me automate some of the testing & it just happened to also be a decent terminal based chat client for any production MCP servers too. Requires using your own Anthropic API key, but other than that it should "just work".
You will need an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY though.
The real win with this is CLI-driven agentic behavior like Claude Code without an API key, using your rate limited chat sub.
Hacking Your Own AI Coding Assistant with Claude Pro and MCP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410866
I started playing around with it yesterday evening. Running Claude Desktop under manjaro linux with some tweaks, I did managed to activate codemcp.
As I am also quite new with mcp and how to proper use the protocol in tools, I am not sure I did everything correct. I did also install filesystem, git, github and sequential-thinking along side.
However, git will not work. The addition of the mcp git server might not be needed? But without it, it did also not work
However, what it has done so far is mind blowing. I did create a long query the other day about a project idea. This generated a road map, detailed implementation instruction, guidlines, all that is needed to complete the problem. I let it Claude Desktop read in the files with help of codemcp.
Claude Dekstop have been working for multiple hours before I seem to have hot some kind of limit. I now get the message to type continue, but it always start the with the same task.
And what it has been created is awesome. The frontend is nearly finished, but it lacked to create the startup code first. Overall I am blow away what I can do with mcp and esp. with this small lib the author has created here. Code quality is good and event though I had multiple limits, where I needed to type continue, the code is logically make sense. Really good!
I also do not yet know how I can continue a old session.
P.S. @anthropic, If you are reading this. I really do not want to abuse your service. Please, instead of giving me no answer, or beeing stuck in an infinite loop, give me a proper return code and a error, that I reached my limit for the next X minutes or so. I would really love this
If you need to start a new chat, it works just fine. Tell Claude what's happened so far and what you want it to do. You can also ask Claude to summarize the old conversation, that's how /compact in claude code works too.
But now that the map only shows me three possible countries I can trivially remember which one it was. Ask me again tomorrow while only showing me the full map and I might guess it's in South America.
Would be interested in hearing what you learned creating Codemcp, how you find MCP as a protocol, and something else that you found interesting doing your project.
btw with claude desktop you can easily hack it to auto-allow MCP, save yourself from clicking "allow" all the time. Dangerous of course if you auto-approve write actions!
https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1h9harx/auto_appr...
The "famously huge API token costs" you are referring to is Cline passing the Anthropic API cost through to you with no markup. You even input your own API token.
I told it to make a TODO list (based on my instructions) and now I'm just repeatedly creating a new chat just saying 'work on the todo list'. The thing I'm giving it to do is pretty easy (fix some React components to add types and replace hardcoded strings with props). Doing the same thing in Cursor was annoying, due to the chatter, and the fact I had to click 'Accept all'.
For single file changes, it's nice. I haven't tried it with more complex things yet.