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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

This requires an MCP-compliant client, for which Claude Desktop seems to be the main (or only?) choice.

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.

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I can report that I tried this setup (Claude Desktop on Linux + codemcp) on the Rust uutils repo asking it to add a "--repeat" option to cat to repeat the output N times (without telling it anything else), and it has generated a commit that looks plausible, correctly locating the implementation file and unit test file and changing them in an apparently correct way (other than mangling a commit just before the code changing \\n to \n).

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.

Cline is another client. They even have a marketplace of MCP server extensions which you can use with Cline or Claude Desktop. https://cline.bot/mcp-marketplace

I just made an open source CLI based chat client that supports MCP servers to solve this problem yesterday at https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-chat.

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 can build your own MCP client https://modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/client

You will need an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY though.

Goose is my favorite desktop experience with bring-your-own API key (most providers) and MCP support: https://github.com/block/goose

The real win with this is CLI-driven agentic behavior like Claude Code without an API key, using your rate limited chat sub.

One thing I'll say, is that if I was going to make people pay API costs (like cline/claude code) I probably wouldn't actually make an MCP. The MCP box is pretty limiting, and I'm only willing to pay the cost because that's how I get onto flat pricing structure.

There's so many MCP clients out there, Cline is IMO the best agentic coding tool that makes heavy use of it.

Codegen is an MCP client that you can trigger via Slack: codegen.com

I haven't tried it, but another one might be 5ire, seems to be able to use mcp.

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