Claude Code

Claude Code is Anthropic’s command-line coding agent. It speaks the standard protocol The Librarian uses (MCP), so connecting it is just a matter of pointing it at your server — no extra plugin code is required for the core experience.

When you’d use this: you run Claude Code and want it to share memory with your other tools, hand work off, and learn from your sessions automatically.

Before you start: you need a running Librarian server, its MCP URL, and an agent token — see Install.

The easy way

One command wires Claude Code in — the connection, the optional slash commands, and the automatic-capture hooks — and keeps it current:

npx @the-librarian/cli install      # choose Claude Code; paste your MCP URL + token
npx @the-librarian/cli update       # later: pull the latest version

That is all most people need. Restart Claude Code afterwards.

The manual way

If you’d rather wire it by hand, add the server to Claude Code’s MCP config. For a single project, create a .mcp.json in the project root:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "librarian": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "${LIBRARIAN_MCP_URL}",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ${LIBRARIAN_AGENT_TOKEN}" }
    }
  }
}

Then set the two values in your shell profile and restart Claude Code:

export LIBRARIAN_MCP_URL="https://librarian.example.com/mcp"
export LIBRARIAN_AGENT_TOKEN="<your-token>"

That wires up memory itself — the seven tools and the primer, and nothing more. The four slash commands and automatic capture ride on the plugin, not bare MCP, so use The easy way above if you want those too. The briefing (primer) arrives automatically at session start.

What you get

• Seven memory and handoff tools — Claude Code can recall, remember, flag a wrong memory, store and claim handoffs, and search references.
• The primer — Claude Code reads The Librarian’s briefing natively, so it knows how and when to use those tools without any prompting from you.
• Four optional slash commands — /handoff, /takeover, /learn, and the local-only /toggle-private. These are convenient shortcuts; saying “hand this off” or “go private” in plain English does exactly the same thing.
• Automatic capture — Claude Code is the most thoroughly tested harness for this. It quietly ships each turn to your server, which extracts durable lessons for you. The capture hook ships enabled, but nothing is filed until you switch on the curator’s Intake in the dashboard (Settings → Curator) — it is off by default. Capture skips anything under private mode and can be turned off per machine with LIBRARIAN_AUTO_SAVE=false.

Claude Cowork (the desktop app)

Claude Cowork shares the same plugin system, so it uses the same integration — install it through the app’s GUI (Customize → Browse plugins → The Librarian) and set the two environment values in the app’s local environment editor rather than your shell. Automatic capture should work unchanged but has not yet been confirmed on the desktop host; if it diverges it simply does not capture, never breaking a turn.

Check it worked

In Claude Code, open the connected-tools view (/mcp). A healthy Librarian lists exactly seven tools under librarian. If it does not appear, confirm both environment values are set in the shell that launched Claude Code.

Full technical reference

For the complete option-by-option setup, the capture hook details, and troubleshooting, see the Claude Code integration README.