The Complete Guide to Claude Code: MCP

A deep dive into MCP in Claude Code, including protocol principles, service integration, context management, and how it differs from Skills

In the previous article, we talked about Plugins and saw how they package commands, Skills, and Hooks into a distributable unit. Inside that package manifest, there is one thing we have not unpacked on its own yet: MCP services. Everything we have discussed so far still lives inside Claude Code’s own world. It can read your local repository and run your local commands, but it knows nothing about what is happening outside. If you want it to look up requirements in Notion while writing code, read Issues on GitHub, or even connect to a database and query real data, MCP is what you need. MCP opens a door from Claude Code to external data and tools, so it no longer has to rely on us copying and pasting information. It can read and write external systems directly. In this article, we will look at what MCP is, what the underlying protocol looks like, how to use it in Claude Code, and how MCP differs from Skills.

What is MCP

The term MCP actually points to two different things depending on the context. The first is Model Context Protocol, an open source protocol released by Anthropic in late 2024…