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Claude Desktop

Anthropic's desktop app and the easiest first MCP client.

🧪 Try it in the Playground 🎯 Practice this path

Claude Desktop is Anthropic's desktop app for chatting with Claude — and it's the friendliest place to try MCP servers.

Why it matters for this course

Claude Desktop was one of the first apps to ship MCP support with a GUI. It's perfect for experimenting before you wire MCP into a CLI agent.

Adding an MCP server

Open Settings → Developer → Edit Config, then edit claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "filesystem": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem", "/path/to/folder"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop. The filesystem tool appears and Claude can now read and write files in that folder.

What to try first

  1. Add the filesystem server pointing at an empty folder.
  2. Ask: "Create a file named notes.md and write a to-do list in it."
  3. Add the fetch server and ask it to summarize a web page.

Limits

Claude Desktop is a chat app, not a coding agent — it won't run your test suite or understand your repo like Claude Code. Think of it as the MCP playground, then graduate to Claude Code or Cursor for real work.

The JSON config you just wrote is the exact same format used by Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf and most other MCP clients. Learn it once, use it everywhere.