claude/beginner

MCP servers — connecting Claude to your stack

Connecting Claude to your stack — Model Context Protocol servers act like APIs Claude can call to reach Azure DevOps, databases, and other systems beyond your local machine.

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What is MCP?

Out of the box, Claude Code can read files, run shell commands, and search your codebase. But what if you want Claude to create a work item in Azure DevOps, query a database, or post a message to Slack? That’s where MCP comes in.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers are like APIs for Claude. They expose external capabilities as tools that Claude can call, just like its built-in tools. The difference is that MCP tools connect to systems outside your local machine - project management platforms, cloud services, databases, SaaS products, and more.

Think of it this way:

Without MCP	With MCP
Claude can only work with local files and shell commands	Claude can interact with external services directly
You’d have to copy/paste info from Azure DevOps into the chat	Claude queries Azure DevOps itself and gets the data
You’d manually create PRs, work items, wiki pages	Claude creates them for you through MCP tools

How it works

An MCP server runs as a background process (or remote HTTP endpoint) that wraps an external API
It advertises a list of tools Claude can call (e.g., wit_create_work_item, repo_create_pull_request)
When Claude decides it needs one of those tools, it calls the MCP server, which executes the action and returns the result
From your perspective, Claude just “knows” how to talk to that system

MCP servers on this team

Our team commonly uses the following MCP servers to give Claude access to:

Server	What it provides
Azure DevOps	Work items, pull requests, repos, pipelines, wikis, test plans, iterations
Repo Reader	Read files and search across other repos without cloning them
Context7	Query up-to-date documentation for any library or framework
Enzo	Internal knowledge base queries

To use these, you’ll need to add/configure the corresponding MCP servers on your machine (and optionally at project scope) using the commands below. You can see all active MCP servers by typing /mcp in the prompt.

Managing MCP servers

In Claude’s prompt:

/mcp

In your terminal:

# Add a server (local scope - only this machine, default)
claude mcp add --transport http context7 https://mcp.context7.com

# Add with project scope (shared with the team via settings)
claude mcp add --transport http ado --scope project https://mcp.dev.azure.com

# Add with user scope (available in all your projects)
claude mcp add --transport http context7 --scope user https://mcp.context7.com

Scopes

Scope	Who gets it	Stored in
`local` (default)	Just you, just this machine	Local config
`project`	Anyone who clones this repo (if project config is committed)	`.mcp.json` in the repo (when used)
`user`	You, across all projects	`~/.claude/.mcp.json`

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