The first thing we need is an MCP client. There are many, many, many MCP clients but I'm going to focus us on two: Claude Desktop or Tome.
If you're unsure which to use, go with Claude. Click here to go download Claude Desktop
Claude is the name of the family of models from Anthropic. Claude Desktop is a desktop app that allows you to ask the various Claude models questions via a desktop app instead of via their web client. Generally speaking the web client is sufficient but we want to use local MCP servers and the web client can't support that easily whereas it's trivial with the desktop client.
As of writing, you do not need the premium version of Claude for this course to work. The free tier is pretty generous. However I really like Claude and I do pay for it.
Once you've downloaded Claude Desktop and logged into your either free or pro account, you should see a textbox where you can start a new chat. Underneath that is something that likely says "Connect your tools to Claude". This is where we can add new MCP servers.
