Tech bits

Quick, copy-paste wins

Small, practical MCP snippets you can use today.

Register a remote or local server in one line — and remember the lone -- that separates Claude's flags from the server command.

# remote, OAuth-backed server
claude mcp add --transport http notion https://mcp.notion.com/mcp

On the stdio transport, stdout is reserved for JSON-RPC messages — send every log line to stderr or the client drops the connection.

import sys

# WRONG: this corrupts the JSON-RPC stream on stdout

Type hints become the schema and the docstring becomes the description — a complete MCP tool in a handful of lines.

from mcp.server.fastmcp import FastMCP

mcp = FastMCP("Demo")

The Python client helper was renamed — streamablehttp_client is deprecated in favour of streamable_http_client.

# deprecated spelling
# from mcp.client.streamable_http import streamablehttp_client

One npx command launches a browser UI to list and call a server's tools, resources, and prompts.

# point it at any server command
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uvx mcp-server-git

Reference secrets with ${VAR} instead of pasting them, so a project .mcp.json is safe to commit.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "github": {

Unset annotations default to the cautious assumption — a tool is treated as destructive and open-world unless you say otherwise.

{
  "name": "delete_file",
  "annotations": {

A server can pause mid-tool to request structured input from the user through the client via ctx.elicit.

from mcp.server.fastmcp import Context
from dataclasses import dataclass

Claude Code caps tool output at 25,000 tokens by default — raise MAX_MCP_OUTPUT_TOKENS when a server's responses get cut off.

# default is 25000 tokens
export MAX_MCP_OUTPUT_TOKENS=50000

Tech Bits