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What is the Model Context Protocol?

In the 1980s, the personal computing revolution put a computer in every living room. Much of it was fueled by the idea of a “Graphical User Interface” (GUI), standardizing how humans and programs interacted.

Twenty years later, cloud computing put software on the internet. Programs started being developed around APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) instead, standardizing how programs interacted with other and programs.

We are on the precipise of agentic computing — programs that can autonomously decide what to do next, solve ambiguous problems, and decide what data and resources they need to accomplish their goals. But we’re still missing a standard way for agents to interact with the rest of the world — an agentic interface layer.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a big step in this direction. It’s an open standard developed by Anthropic to help AI models, agents, and systems connect with external data sources and tools.

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How does MCP work?

The MCP distinguishes between Clients and Servers. Clients are AI applications, like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Windsurf. Servers expose data and tools to the client, and are usually created by the company or developers that host the data, but there is a rich ecosystem of third-party servers too. In Hyperspell’s case, we’re providing an MCP server that lets you query and add data to your Hyperspell app.

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Local vs Remote Servers

There are two flavors of MCP servers:

• Local servers run on your own machine, and are great for uses cases involving your local files, or even controlling your own hardware.
• Remote servers run in the cloud, and make it easy to connect clients.

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Tools, Prompts, and Resources

MCP servers provide clients with tools, resources, prompts, completions, and more. You can read more about them on the Model Context Protocol website, but the Hyperspell MCP server is focused on providing tools and resources:

• Tools are actions that can be taken by the client. In our case, we’re providing the tools to query Hyperspell for data, and to add data to Hyperspell either by providing text that Hyperspell should remember, or the URL to a file or web page.
• Resources are data sources that can be queried by the client. For example, a resource could be a file in your local filesystem, or a record in a database. With the Hyperspell MCP server, you retrieve your collections and documents as resources.

Some MCP Clients (looking at you, Claude Desktop) have only poor support for using resources, so you can configure the Hyperspell MCP server to expose collections and documents as tools rather than as resources so Claude can dynamically accesst them when needed.

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Usage

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In Claude Desktop

To use the Hyperspell MCP Server in Claude Desktop, you need to

the easiest way to do that is to install it with Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @hyperspell/hyperspell_mcp --client claude --hyperspellToken "user-or-app-token"

npx -y @smithery/cli install @hyperspell/hyperspell_mcp --client claude --hyperspellToken "user-or-app-token"

git clone https://github.com/hyperspell/hyperspell_mcp.git

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "Hyperspell": {
      "command": "/path/to/uv",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "--with",
        "hyperspell",
        "--with",
        "mcp[cli]",
        "mcp",
        "run",
        "/path/to/hyperspell_mcp/server.py"
      ],
      "env": {
        "HYPERSPELL_TOKEN": "<app or user token>",
        "USE_RESOURCES": "false"
      }
    }
  }
}