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How to use MCP to give Claude access to your own tools

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets you connect Claude to external data sources and tools — databases, APIs, file systems, or anything else you can wrap in a small server. This guide walks through what MCP is, how to set up a basic server, and how to connect it to Claude so your agents can call your own systems. You do not need deep infrastructure knowledge. If you can run a Node or Python script, you can build and connect an MCP server.

6 min

Build a 3-step research agent with Claude and a single prompt file

A research agent is a structured prompt system that breaks a broad question into smaller tasks, runs each one in sequence, and assembles the results into a usable output. This guide shows you how to build a three-step version using Claude and a single prompt file — no frameworks, no orchestration libraries. You define three prompts, run them in order, and pipe the output of each into the next. The result is a repeatable research workflow you can apply to any topic in under a minute.

6 min

A practical checklist for shipping multi-step Claude agents

Multi-step agents are Claude-powered systems that run a sequence of tasks with minimal human input between steps. They are useful and they break in predictable ways. This checklist covers what to verify before you call an agent production-ready: prompt isolation, error handling, output validation, cost controls, and logging. Work through the list before you hand any agent a live system to operate on. It takes about an hour and will save you several painful debugging sessions.

5 min

What the latest Claude 4 update changes for prompt engineers

Claude 4 is Anthropic's fourth-generation model family, which includes Opus 4, Sonnet 4, and Haiku 4. The latest updates to this family change how the models handle long prompts, system instructions, and tool use — all of which affect how prompt engineers write and structure their work. This post covers the specific changes that matter in practice: what still works, what works better, and what needs to be rewritten for prompts designed around earlier Claude versions.

6 min