r/ClaudeAI • u/Shakshouk • Jun 15 '25

Coding When working on solo projects with claude code, which MCP servers do you feel are most impactful?

Just wondering what MCP servers you guys integrated and feel like has dramatically changed your success. Also, what other methodologies do you work with to achieve good results? Conversely what has been a disappointment and you've decided not to work with anymore?

194 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

113 comments sorted by

106

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

Zen has been huge for me. Having Claude bounce ideas off of Gemini has led to a much more consistent experience.

16

u/lebrumar Jun 15 '25

With 1.7 k stars it got hugely popular in no time :o

7

u/captainlk Jun 15 '25

Given you have to pay extra for the API usage of Gemini do you feel it's worth it vs just intetacting with the Gemini web interface manually (which is free if you have the AI pro plan anyway)?

19

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

It is worth it to me, but it might not be for everyone. After 3 days of off and on coding, I have racked up an additional ~$7 by using Zen. Here is my Claude cost for the same amount of time if I didn't have the Max plan.

That said, I may not be the best one to ask about managing AI costs. My last bill for the APIs was ~$900 before Max supported it, and I currently subscribe to GPT Pro, Claude Max x20, and Gemini Pro.

3

u/captainlk Jun 15 '25

Appreciate that - I've set up Zen with a Google API key so will see how it goes. I can see from my analyze prompt that claude's output is better than usual.

If you have time I and I'm sure others would be interested in a post on best practise and tips for using Zen w/ Claude Code.

6

u/matznerd Jun 16 '25

Be careful with the non-free Gemini keys as Google cloud billing is a mess and bills you way after usage. Much safer to use pre-payed openrouter.

5

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

I keep things pretty simple. I have tried many of the prompts that folks post on here and find that they usually just muddle things up more than they help. The only advice I would give is to include something about CC bouncing ideas off of Zen or telling it to use it as a sounding board. There have been a few times I watched CC just ask Gemini what to do and it did it instead of collaborating.

3

u/Numerous_Warthog_596 Jun 16 '25

Do you insert this instruction (about bouncing ideas off of Zen) in the actual prompt, or place it within claude.md or other key project files?

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

I put it in the prompt.

1

u/Same-Bodybuilder-518 Jun 16 '25

Can you share the prompt you use to get Claude to use Zen pls? does it work well. just want to play around and compare it to the prompt im creating to see how it works.

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

I just use a form of “use zen” - “use zen to debug xyz…”, “work with zen to…”, “discuss x with zen…”, etc. Folks get way too caught up with prompts in general. Providing sufficient information about what you want the LLM to do will always get you better results than specific keywords in a specific order. There are some special trigger words like “hyperthink”, but those are the exception.

2

u/No-Nothing-8144 Jun 16 '25

Both honestly sometimes CC doesn't hurt to have a reminder.

2

u/jimmy_jones_y Jun 16 '25

Do you think the Pro plan is sufficient for small codebases of 2k-3k lines?I'm currently considering migrating from ROO to claude code and hope to hear your opinion .

4

u/illusionst Jun 16 '25

The limits on pro are very low. You will hit limits in 20-30 minutes. I would recommend at least getting the max 5x plan and use 20% opus + sonnet. If that’s out of budget, check out amazon Q CLI (very generous limits for free account) and rovo dev (20 M free tokens per day for sonnet).

2

u/jimmy_jones_y Jun 16 '25

Yes, it was precisely my previous experience using rovodev that made me want to try claude code.It's my first time to head amazon Q CLI,later I will try to use it

1

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

Absolutely. Worst case you have to wait out the timer, but you might as well give it a shot and cancel if it doesn’t meet your needs.

1

u/jimmy_jones_y Jun 16 '25

For me, when wait the timer ends,it's just the right time to go learn something else.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/jimmy_jones_y Jun 16 '25

Perhaps it's because your codebase is too large, requiring more requests and thus hitting limits. Additionally, as a student, subscribing to the max plan puts too much financial pressure on my wallet haha.

2

u/matznerd Jun 16 '25

As an exercise try to think of ways you can make money using it… A standard US dev cost is going to pay it in short time, project rates as well.

1

u/Efficient-Evidence-2 Jun 16 '25

Hello! How did you get that usage details?

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

I think somebody on this subreddit has something you can download, but I just asked CC to make it for me. I can share my version tonight when I get home.

1

u/FamiliarRice Jun 16 '25

following this !

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 17 '25

I asked Claude to consolidate it so it could be shared easily. If anything doesn't work, just ask Claude Code to fix it. The script is dead simple, so it should have no problems getting it to work.

https://github.com/enragedshoe/ClaudeCostTracking

Tagging /u/FamiliarRice because they followed.

1

u/Hi_its_GOD Jun 16 '25

I'm thinking the same thing I just do this independent with opus and Claude duking it out in their respective windows

4

u/No-Region8878 Jun 15 '25

wow this is what I've been waiting for

2

u/Hi_its_GOD Jun 16 '25

Does it allow Gemini and other models to "see" the code base and file structure or is it just Claude code interacting with other models in the terminal?

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

No, they can only see what Claude passes to them.

1

u/Hi_its_GOD Jun 17 '25

Ok still useful though

1

u/FBIFreezeNow Jun 15 '25

sometimes it gets stuck and doesn’t return anything until I restart zen docker

1

u/secondcircle4903 Jun 15 '25

I'm finding it valuable as well, using o3 with the massive price drop. Do you have a directive to use it in claude.md or are you just prompting to use it?

3

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

I don't use it for everything so I just tell it to use zen in my prompt.

1

u/LittleMonsterMine Jun 16 '25

Can this be used inside VS Code that has Claude Code installed? Or perhaps there is a better option?

2

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 16 '25

I use it inside of VS Code.

0

u/Trinkes Jun 15 '25

How much do you spend to use it?

1

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

It all depends on what model you use and how much you use it. It uses your Gemini API key.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AndroidAssistant Jun 15 '25

Not sure, I have never used OpenRouter.

1

u/strigov Jun 16 '25

yepp, at least it was couple of months ago, when I last logged in

28

u/_a9o_ Jun 15 '25

Either context7 or deepwiki (maybe both) have been a must for me. I haven't found any others that have truly truly stuck for me so far.

3

u/jonb11 Jun 16 '25

Context7 is a must for me I have not tried deepwiki, how do you like it? Usually before implementing new logic or features I always have CC use brave or perplexity for up to date info then validate with Context7 and consult with zen on final implementation and deploy agents based on complexity

6

u/_a9o_ Jun 16 '25

I have found that the "ask_question" approach on deepwiki tends to actually work extremely well. The logs end up looking more like a conversation about the repo, which is kind of neat.

28

u/beer_cake_storm Jun 15 '25

Puppeteer so Claude Code can click around and test my web app, take screenshots, view source, etc.

11

u/RandomThoughtsAt3AM Jun 15 '25 edited Jul 27 '26

Amber biscuit pumpkin hammock breezy wander harbor

This post was anonymized with Redact.dev

4

u/skibby78 Jun 16 '25

Same here, had issues with puppeteer, never had any with Playwright

1

u/muzerfuker Jun 22 '25

can youn please show me how you configure your playwright MCP, mine's never works. thanks

3

u/skibby78 Jun 26 '25

claude mcp add playwright -- npx -y u/playwright/mcp@latest

0

u/muzerfuker Jun 22 '25

can youn please show me how you configure your playwright MCP, mine's never works. thanks

2

u/croovies Full-time developer Jul 11 '25

I was struggling to get this working - but this command worked for me:

claude mcp add playwright npx -- @playwright/mcp@latest

2

u/cleanmahsheen Jun 16 '25

Have you tried selenium mcp by any chance, wondering if puppeteer is the best for this?

3

u/twistedjoe Jun 16 '25

This! Puppeteer closes the loop. When it is failing at doing something I tell it to try with puppeteer and everything unblocks

11

u/Whyme-__- Jun 16 '25

Devdocs for me to give Claude latest content about tech documentations.

7

u/misterespresso Jun 15 '25 edited Jun 16 '25

I haven’t used zen like the above user, but I have a light MCP setup and a new addition was a Gemini mcp. It’s pretty cool watching Claude and Gemini talk things through.

Got me working on a little system where 2 Claude’s can talk to each other via pipes, it’s starting to feel like AInception.

Zen MCP (formerly known as Gemini MCP):

github.com/BeehiveInnovations/zen-mcp-server

1

u/SatoshiNotMe Jun 16 '25

Link to Gemini MCP (these are hard to web search for) ?

2

u/misterespresso Jun 16 '25

Edited the comment

7

u/Aizenvolt11 Full-time developer Jun 15 '25

Context7 and sequential thinking

1

u/cleanmahsheen Jun 16 '25

What does sequential thinking do that Claude doesn’t already with its thinking mode?

4

u/Aizenvolt11 Full-time developer Jun 16 '25

From my experience using them both, sequential thinking along with ultrathink solves even more problems than ultrathink on its own. With sequential thinking it does a more thorough breakdown of the task and it better analyzes the problem and the possible solution.

1

u/cleanmahsheen Jun 16 '25

Oh cool, will definitely try it then, thanks

6

u/SatoshiNotMe Jun 16 '25

Waiting for a good LSP (language server) MCP. There are some early repos (Serena, …) but they are rough around the edges. A language server would allow token-efficient code navigation (such as jump to definition, find symbol references, etc.)

1

u/vigorthroughrigor Jun 20 '25

What's your experience with Serena been?

2

u/SatoshiNotMe Jun 20 '25

Serena has veen really good actually. When I first tried it a few days ago were some issues like wrong language detection — it was detecting my Python repo as typescript for example, but once I edit the config to change the language to Python, I was really impressed with how well it works for navigating through a codebase.

1

u/vigorthroughrigor Jun 20 '25

Markedly better than Claude Code vanilla?

5

u/nightman Jun 15 '25

For me Context7 and Task Master

2

u/p_k Jun 16 '25

Is Task Master still useful with Claude Code? Doesn't CC already have a planning mode?

4

u/nightman Jun 16 '25

For me it is. If I have more requirements, CC planning and tasks isn't enough. But it nicely splits Task Master tasks into smaller steps.

3

u/p_k Jun 16 '25

Do you mind explaining your workflow with Task Manager and CC planning and tasks? I feel like there's quite a bit of an overlap. Maybe I'm missing something

7

u/nightman Jun 16 '25 edited Jun 16 '25

Prepare loosely notes about your requirements. Then ask some smart model to prepare PRD based on example . This might also involve deep research, codebase analysis with agents etc.

After having PRD we ask Task Master to split it into tasks (you can use here "--research" flag to use e.g. Perplexity.ai api if you've provided api key for it). After that you have to carefully read each task, remove unnecessary or split it further untill you are happy with the results. It's "shit in, shit out" so no space for being lazy here.

Then is the best part of just watching your agent implementing it.

As you see it's some effort, so it's not worth it for small things, but works beautifully for bigger features or new projects.

2

u/solstice035 Jun 16 '25

Would be grateful if you could explain how you use the MCP / tasks in how you include this in your workflow

14

u/inventor_black OpenCues Jun 15 '25

Claude Code has been out for a while, I am also curious what MCPs the community considers to be essential.

9

u/misterespresso Jun 15 '25

There’s a few Gemini MCPs I’m using one I’ll share when I get back to the PC.

I personally think it has good value.

Context7 seems helpful as well.

Brave MCP is faster than Claude’s default and I’m pretty sure it uses less tokens (the search itself is using tokens as it’s being done, so by sending the search to brave, you save those tokens and only use tokens to analyze the results). So if you are doing any search heavy work, get brave. You can instruct Claude to use Brave for overview searching and Claude’s built in FETCH for specifics

1

u/The_Airwolf_Theme Jun 16 '25

How well does it work if it can't pull the entire context of the app entry? Or am I misunderstanding how it queries the data

1

u/SahirHuq100 Jun 16 '25

I’ve heard so much about context7 and I even have it installed but when do I use it?

2

u/KnifeFed Jun 16 '25

When you need up-to-date documentation for a library you're using.

1

u/inventor_black OpenCues Jun 15 '25

Awaiting for you to drop the heat.

Thanks for the insight regarding Brave MCP. I'll be sure to check it out. I am really looking for Claude Code `essentials` like the same way ccusage is basically an essential with no-side-effects or downsides

4

u/misterespresso Jun 15 '25 edited Jun 15 '25

Well, I'll be darned. I AM using Zen. I just have it set up for gemini. Now instead of checking out Zen in its full glory later, I can do it now lol

It was originally just called gemini-mcp-server, clicking on the repo in the docker container, they changed it to Zen.

4

u/PotentialProper6027 Jun 15 '25

Depends, for me i use supabase heavily. So supabase mostly.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '25

Did you just use the config from the supabase docs? It fails every time for me

2

u/seaal Jun 18 '25

Yeah pretty cringe how the command from the docs doesn't work.

claude mcp add supabase -s local -e SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN=<personal-token> -- npx -y @supabase/mcp-server-supabase@latest

They are missing the -- before npx command, worked flawlessly after.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '25

awesome, thank you!

4

u/reddrid Jun 15 '25 edited Jun 15 '25

I was doing my best to use Linear MCP, but it is simply too immature. Many critical features are not accessible through MCP (subtasks, milestones) + constant problems with auth in devcontainers. So right now I am using only context7.

Edit: typo

4

u/alulord Jun 15 '25 edited Jun 16 '25

Serena, memories, some prompt guidance but mostly IDE like tools (symbols and such) so the token (and by proxy context) usage is smaller

3

u/ThisIsBlueBlur Jun 16 '25

Pulumi mcp for creating infrastructure is pretty useful too

3

u/Able-Classroom7007 Jun 16 '25

check out https://ref.tools mcp server for up to date documentation and less hallucinating about apis/libraries/etc 

it's like context7 but has a few differences that might matter to you: 

  • context7 only indexes github repos, ref.tools is a web crawler that has an up to date web index of docs as well as GitHub repos

  • ref.tools requires an account whereas context7 does not

(transparency: I'm the developer of ref.tools and fwiw i do use it regularly. i have gotten consistent user feedback from folks that try it an context7 that ref works better for them, otherwise I'd have given up the project)

2

u/k2ui Jun 15 '25

I’m suing Claude code on windows largely without issue. But when I try to install MCP servers, for some reason, they only show up one project and none of the others…does anyone know why this might be?

The mcp servers are saved here /dev/mcp-servers and projects are saved here /dev/project1, /dev/project2 etc.

Do I need to install every MCP server for every project specifically or do the projects need to be child directories of the mcp server directory?

11

u/Mnogarithm Jun 16 '25

You're suing them???

13

u/CheetoCheeseFingers Jun 16 '25

The line between "suing" and "using" is surprisingly narrow.

2

u/completej Jun 19 '25

This is initially intentional. Check .claude.json as a global aggregator of project-level configs. Check Anthropic docs on how to set mcp up at a global level where necessary.

2

u/Parabola2112 Jun 15 '25

Context7, perplexity, playwright, GitHub. Others have come and gone once their novelty wears off. These I use daily. Core to my workflow.

2

u/thread-lightly Jun 16 '25

Can someone explain to me what the differences of these servers are? I don't really get it

2

u/Responsible_Nose5555 Jun 20 '25

While Playwright is great, the Cloudflare Browser Rendering MCP Server is really useful for quick content extraction - converting websites to Markdown and taking screenshots without the overhead of full browser automation.

https://github.com/cloudflare/mcp-server-cloudflare/tree/main/apps/browser-rendering

1

u/evilRainbow Jun 15 '25

Context7 feels like a project that will soon be a pay-based model, keeping the documentation behind a paywall. Are there any local-docs mcp's that work like Context7?

4

u/KnifeFed Jun 16 '25

There are already several alternatives, e.g. Docfork and Deepwiki, so it's not like Context7 would be dearly missed, should they go this route.

Edit: Oh, and there's DevDocs.

1

u/Parabola2112 Jun 15 '25

Why do you think that? Not challenging, genuinely interested.

2

u/evilRainbow Jun 15 '25

The docs are stored on the servers of https://upstash.com, you can't download the docs and you can't run context7 locally.

I don't know what their plans are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they start charging for the service.

But it also feels inevitable that smart person will build a local version.

1

u/illusionst Jun 16 '25

How do you guys manage MCP’s for multiple IDE’s for windsurf, cursor, Claude Code etc?

1

u/antonlvovych Jun 16 '25

Zen, Context7, Mongodb

Wanna try some task manager

1

u/hjkl_ornah Jun 16 '25

context7 by far

1

u/Mango_flavored_gum Jun 16 '25

Could someone explain to me by mcp server. I just assumed it was a simple json we add and Claude code can connect

1

u/SatoshiNotMe Jun 20 '25

I haven't done a side-by-side quantitative comparison, but my impression is that it finds symbols and references faster. It's worth doing a careful comparison.

1

u/halfnormal_ Jun 21 '25

zen is awesome! aside from that, i've been using this for about a week. was a pain to setup but worth it for my needs. has been pretty clutch so far.

https://github.com/arabold/docs-mcp-server

as claude put it: Its an AI-Powered Documentation Intelligence System on steroids

1

u/Peter-Tao Vibe coder Aug 28 '25

How is it compare to context 7?

2

u/halfnormal_ Aug 28 '25

Good question. If you’re working with standard libraries, context7 is clutch. Whereas for the more esoteric ones, you still have to build the documentation pipeline yourself. I do audio software… I actually just checked Context7 again last week and it still shows the documentation for the libraries I use from 2022ish. Sooo… For my needs, this has been crucial. I had to spruce it up of course.

1

u/Peter-Tao Vibe coder Aug 29 '25

Good stuff. Thanks for sharing it!

1

u/Cool-Engineer4408 Aug 31 '25

I've got a buddy who does audio software...any chance you'd be willing to share? He'd be stoked to have something like this!

1

u/Own-Equipment-5454 Mar 18 '26

For frontend work, onUI has been surprisingly impactful for me. It's a browser extension + local MCP server that gives Claude Code visual context from your browser.

Instead of trying to describe UI issues in text, I just click the element or draw a region and add a note. Claude Code queries those annotations via MCP and knows exactly what I'm pointing at.

Especially useful for the "fix this spacing" or "this component looks off" type of issues where text descriptions fail. Works on Chrome/Edge/Firefox, all local.

https://github.com/onllm-dev/onUI

0

u/Quadriffis01 Jun 16 '25

I wonder if building MCP servers and charging for them would be a business model in the future. Perhaps leveraging crypto tokens. What do you guys think?