MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers are how you wire Claude Code into the external world. Any capability you can expose over stdio or HTTP (Linear, Stripe, Supabase, your internal admin API) becomes a tool the agent can call natively. MCP is the single biggest lever for turning Claude Code into a senior SaaS engineer.
Updated: April 24, 2026
MCP is an open protocol for exposing tools, resources and prompts to any LLM host. Servers run locally or remotely; Claude Code auto-discovers them via `.mcp.json` and presents their tools to Opus 4.7 on every turn.
The four we use on almost every Alher Tech project: Linear (ticket tracking), Supabase (database + auth), Stripe (billing), and Playwright (browser testing). Each one lets the agent operate end-to-end (create a ticket, add a table, price a new plan, run an E2E test) without leaving the CLI.
A minimal server is ~50 lines of TypeScript. Declare tools, handle `tools/list` and `tools/call`, return a structured result. Within an afternoon you can wrap your company's internal API so Claude Code can create customers, provision tenants or seed demo data as a first-class action.
MCP servers run with your local permissions. Scope their tokens, use read-only credentials by default, and wire a PreToolUse hook to require confirmation before any mutating action against production. For enterprise clients we run MCP servers inside a sandboxed Docker network.
No. MCP is an open standard. Cursor, Windsurf and several other clients support it. Building against MCP means your tooling is portable across hosts.