Consuming with hosts such as Claude Desktop and VS Code
Consuming servers, okay, what does that mean? So to use an MCP server and its features, you need a way to interact with it. You’ve seen in Chapter 7 how to create a server and how to write a client that can interact with it. That’s a perfectly valid way to consume a server, but it requires you to write code.
Another approach is to use existing software such as Claude Desktop or VS Code. These tools are designed to work with MCP servers, and they also provide a large language model that ensures that you can interact with the server in a more user-friendly way via prompts.
We think of these two pieces of software as hosts, as they have a built-in MCP client, but they also use configuration files to keep track of the servers that are installed, the tools that are available, and so on.
How do they work? Well, they work in the following way:
- Initiate a connection to the MCP server through a selected...