Wholesale AI Champions Claude Code playbook
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Anthony Cowart

macOS · .NET / Aspire · React · Native iOS

MCPs

The five I keep connected, in rough usage order:

  • Google Drive — reading Sheets and Word docs.
  • Slack — looking up past conversations and channel context without leaving the terminal.
  • Splunk — reading Carvana logs.
  • Context7 — current library docs so Claude isn’t relying on stale training data.
  • Azure DevOps — on and off. Love/hate.

Install commands for all five live on the MCPs page.

Not yet on the MCPs page (but worth adding)

  • Playwright — browser automation for end-to-end checks.

    Terminal window
    claude mcp add playwright npx @playwright/mcp@latest

  • Xcode — gives Claude access to your active Xcode workspace. Told SMW about it and they love it too. Apple docs.

  • Datadog — Bits AI MCP for traces, metrics, and logs. Claude Code setup.

  • Aspire — if you use Aspire. Get started.

I also lean on GitHub Agent HQ + gh-aw for the long-tail backlog and recurring maintenance work — most notably an autonomously-improving-agents workflow in adesa-digital-inventory-manager that scores and refines my Claude Code agents on every push to master.

Aspire apps

If you use .NET Aspire as your local AppHost, the Aspire MCP server is what makes Claude Code actually useful in that workflow — instead of pasting connection strings and endpoint URLs into the prompt, Claude reads them straight off the running AppHost.

Where this pays off is in repos like adesa-digital-inventory-manager. The AppHost wires up PostgreSQL with PgAdmin, an Azure Service Bus emulator (with a topic and subscription), the migration runner, the API itself, and a small Service Bus Explorer Blazor app — one aspire run --launch-profile dev and the whole topology is up. The same AppHost.cs also has alternate flows (schema generate, schema assert) that swap which projects run based on a config flag, so the entire matrix of “what mode am I in right now” is owned by Aspire instead of scattered launch settings.

On top of that I’ve added five project-local skills under .claude/skills/ that lean on those Aspire-managed resources:

  • /start-aspire — boot the AppHost and verify resource health
  • /get-token — pull an Auth0 JWT from .NET user secrets
  • /query-db — docker exec against the running PostgreSQL container
  • /test-endpoint — full end-to-end: token, request, DB verify, log check
  • /wolverine-describe — regenerate the Wolverine topology snapshot in claude.md

Trigger phrases like “test the endpoint” or “check the database” auto-fire the right skill, so most prompts stay short.

A few gotchas worth knowing if you set this up:

  • The Aspire MCP requires aspire run, not dotnet run — only aspire registers with the backchannel the MCP listens on.
  • When starting Aspire from Bash, set dangerouslyDisableSandbox: true. The default sandbox blocks the Unix socket at ~/.aspire/cli/backchannels/ that the MCP uses for AppHost discovery.
  • After killing and restarting Aspire, reconnect via /mcp in Claude Code before resource-listing tools work again.