[HN Gopher] Hacking Your Own AI Coding Assistant with Claude Pro...
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Hacking Your Own AI Coding Assistant with Claude Pro and MCP
Author : zbeegnew
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-03-19 12:13 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zbeegnew.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zbeegnew.dev)
| chaosprint wrote:
| I have cancelled the cursor subscription, but it is more for
| functional reasons.
|
| I am confused that the author said he has privacy concerns about
| cursor, but the most satisfactory thing about cursor is that it
| asked me whether I want privacy mode at the beginning.
|
| On the contrary, I am very skeptical about whether these websites
| with free quotas, not only claude, but also grok, chatgpt, etc.,
| will use chat data for training.
|
| If you are really worried about this, it is not impossible to
| deploy deepseek r1 locally now.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The free LLM service is the new free VPN.
| lyime wrote:
| It seems fair for them to train on how people use their tools,
| so they can make the tools better for people who use them?
| simonw wrote:
| Claude won't train on your inputs, even for free trial
| accounts. That's clearly spelled out in their terms:
| https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms
|
| > We will not train our models on any Materials that are not
| publicly available, except in two circumstances:
|
| > 1. If you provide Feedback to us (through the Services or
| otherwise) regarding any Materials, we may use that Feedback in
| accordance with Section 5 (Feedback).
|
| > 2. If your Materials are flagged for trust and safety review,
| we may use or analyze those Materials to improve our ability to
| detect and enforce Acceptable Use Policy violations, including
| training models for use by our trust and safety team,
| consistent with Anthropic's safety mission.
|
| You have to read the terms carefully for everyone though, it's
| frustratingly hard work to keep up with these policies.
|
| Anthropic do have a very interesting way of analyzing usage of
| their tools without exposing any data to their researchers:
| https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/12/clio/
| bionhoward wrote:
| Do they even need inputs to train on outputs by inferring
| inputs? Swear I've seen papers about this. Not to mention
| training reward models to grade the output... they could
| absolutely get around the "we don't train on your inputs"
|
| Also, doesn't Claude Code count every input as "feedback?"
|
| Plus, they forbid us from training on our own chat logs.
| That's a form of vendor lock in. Way better to use local LLMs
|
| At some point there ought to be a paradigm shift toward
| service providers with more reasonable legal terms (IMHO) but
| too often we pretend nobody reads them or cares
|
| If they're claiming not to learn from inputs, and we're
| subject to prohibition about learning from outputs, what the
| heck is the point?
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15012
| vessenes wrote:
| MCP documentation is thin on the ground, but I like what I've
| seen. I think it provides a nice separation of concerns for using
| LLMs as Agents.
|
| The article mentions a python MCP library, there seems to be a
| pretty vibrant golang MCP server as well at
| https://github.com/mark3labs/mcp-go. No personal experience, but
| I'd usually rather a binary than a python environment install
| when I can get it.
|
| The other thing the author mentions is that Claude can author MCP
| integrations and merge them into your server -- sounds good to
| me!
| cnj wrote:
| I predict that Anthropic will clamp down on the heavy agentic use
| of Claude Pro, the cost gap between Claude Code and this approach
| is HUGE...
|
| Anyway, I'm doing the same - one extra tip is to use the
| "project" feature of Claude Desktop to give your coding assistant
| some context - use it similar to .cursorrules.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Why would they? There's already rate limits in place. If you
| use it too much, you have to stop for a while. Whether you're
| doing text extraction from large documents, having it write
| your memoir, or using a diy Claude Code, what's the difference?
| ezyang wrote:
| There's also some fundamental limitations to the Desktop MCP
| experience that are probably never getting fixed; Claude Code
| can spin off subagents and play around with the context, I
| assume that Claude Desktop's form factor is basically going
| to stay the way it is until the end of time lol.
| nemofoo wrote:
| The cost savings here are pretty wild! I wonder if Anthropic will
| push back
| davely wrote:
| They are for sure going to lock this down.
|
| I've gone through $25 USD in API credits in a single afternoon
| with Claude Code (I love it, but that thing is _thirsty_ for
| dollar bills).
|
| I've been reluctant to try this sort of thing out because it's
| fairly trivial for them to detect this and potentially come
| down with the ban hammer. I'd rather not risk it.
|
| Anyway, I've found myself switching back to Aider as of late
| because it is much more conservative in how it uses its token
| budget.
| ezyang wrote:
| IMO, the big problem with Aider is that it's not agentic.
| This is good because it means costs are down, but most of the
| edit-test-fix loop magic in coding agents comes from the
| agent loop.
| lyime wrote:
| You are not getting more than $25 of value?
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. Once something stops being free the human
| brain starts setting expectations (at least mine does.)
| Sure that last conversation "only" cost $0.08 but since I'm
| now paying it better damn well work and not fuck up my
| code. And even though it was only $0.08 I'll be cranky that
| I have to undo its changes because it went down a rabbit
| hole and now need to reprompt it or ask it what the hell it
| thinks it's doing... costing yet another $0.08.
|
| Sure it's a few pennies but it does add up. I'm sure there
| is some research or term / explanation for this phenomenon.
| ezyang wrote:
| And with Claude Code, it's typically not $0.08... it's
| more like $0.50, $5.00 just for a roll LOL. Variable
| rewards gambling addiction? Definitely...
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I was thinking cursor pricing. It becomes a whole
| different ballgame when you plug these tools into the
| providers API and pay by the token. Suddenly you really
| start evaluating how much value you are actually getting
| out of the tool!
| ToJans wrote:
| I've been using Claude with the MCP servers daily, and get
| put on pause a few times a day due to my heavy usage.
|
| However, I do hope they do not plan to use the pricing that
| they are using for Claude max, as a single prompt usually
| generates about 50 tool calls for my use case. (In max this
| would cost me $5.05). I'll easily burn $50 to $100 per hour,
| and I haven't even added all the tools I'd like to use yet...
|
| If it gets expensive, I'll probably only use it for
| architectural work, and use my own AI LLM for more tactical
| tasks.
|
| This will be slower and less powerful, but we already have an
| AI server for image analysis, so it makes sense to use it.
| ezyang wrote:
| There's a few coding MCPs out there. I have also written one
| (codemcp) and the pitch for mine is that it DOESN'T provide a
| bash tool by default and checkpoints your filesystem edits every
| change in Git, so that it's all about feeling comfortable with
| letting the agent run to completion and then only inspect the
| final result. The oldest one in the space, I think, is wcgw.
| atxtechbro wrote:
| Sounds interesting, but I assume it is only available if you have
| access to Claude Desktop which is not available on Linux if I
| understand correctly.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| It should work on any client that supports MCP, of which there
| are many:
|
| https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients
| ezyang wrote:
| But only Claude Desktop gets flat $20 pricing from Claude Pro
| lol
| roger_ wrote:
| I'm interested in using MCP for pair programming.
|
| What tool can I use to point it to a directory and give Claude
| access to the code? I don't want to have to write my own server.
| ezyang wrote:
| You can try (self promo) https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp .
| https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw is also quite popular,
| although they allow unrestricted shell access (that's why it's
| named wcgw lol).
| roger_ wrote:
| Thanks! Does codemcp support having the server on another
| machine? Maybe communicate over ssh?
| ezyang wrote:
| Not built in, you'll have to use something like
| https://github.com/sparfenyuk/mcp-proxy
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The official filesystem MCP Server:
| https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
|
| (It's not specifically made for coding.)
| _joel wrote:
| I built an entire site making it meet the complete spec (with
| some esoteric tings, it's a non profit) in one day yesterday with
| Roocode and Claude 3.7 Sonnet. It cost about $30 in total
| (appreciate I could do it cheaper but was using anthropic api
| directly). It's amazing, it would have taken me a couple of weeks
| to get everything right. Getting it to do tests as part of the
| process and some sublte engineering to get it not to get stuck in
| loops and ignore files are a must. It's also fun using it in
| Architect mode and feeding it with Perplexity AI's deep research
| output as a series of prompt for ingestion into roocode.
| ezyang wrote:
| If you'd done it with MCP it would only have cost you $20 and
| you would still have had the rest of the month to use your
| Claude Pro sub :P
| _joel wrote:
| This is true! :)
| chaosprint wrote:
| If you use bolt.new or v0's free tier to make a design and
| perfect it in cursor, the speed will be much faster than roo,
| and there will probably be a lot of fast credits left. cost $20
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Coding is only half the interesting part. Get that MCP to start
| looking through your logs and figuring out some issue. Then have
| it look at your code, your db schema and your platform config in
| terraform and all of a sudden things get pretty wild.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| For anyone trying this at home, if you want a starting point, you
| could use OP's, or you could use the official Filesystem API:
| https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
| There are folks using just this filesystem API for coding:
| https://x.com/Zirkman/status/1897003182049649000
|
| I'm not sure I would prefer it to using Cursor. I was using
| Claude Desktop client to edit a bunch of (non-code) text files a
| couple of days ago, and a couple of times it crashed, and I had
| to restart it. When this happened, it lost some conversation
| history, although of course the files it had already edited were
| fine.
|
| There are other approaches to having Claude edit files, but
| they're less suited for use with MCP (and hence they don't save
| cost like the OP does).
|
| A) Aider gives very specific instructions about how Claude should
| describe patch operations: https://github.com/Aider-
| AI/aider/blob/dd4d2420df51dc29c2aed...
|
| This works, but I don't know if anyone has tried using this
| technique in an MCP server. It seems like the way OP and the
| Filesystem MCP might be superior for small edits, but Aider's
| approach might be better for multiple edits in a single request-
| response. It should be possible to do this with an MCP server.
|
| B) Anthropic provides fine-tuned models (text_editor_20250124 and
| text_editor_20241022) that know a specific text editing protocol:
| https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...
|
| You could build a coding assistant like Aider on top of these,
| but obviously you're then tied to this implementation and it's
| harder to switch out models. And it wouldn't work with Claude
| Desktop.
| ezyang wrote:
| I don't really recommend using filesystem MCP directly, it
| won't checkpoint changes so it's easy to end up in a state
| where you can't recover an older working version of the code.
| Use an actual coding oriented MCP.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'm going to try out yours
| (https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp). I already pay for
| Cursor, but I'm curious.
|
| EDIT: I really like the way that each change generates a
| commit, and that all commits in a single session are squashed
| into one commit, whilst preserving the hash of each
| individual change.
|
| EDIT2: I also like you only have one function (each command
| being a 'subtool'), which means Claude Desktop asks for
| permission only once per session.
| ezyang wrote:
| And if you don't like clicking, even once, check out my
| other project, Refined Claude :)
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Wow. You should go on baby leave more often!
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Show HN: Codemcp - Claude Code for Claude Pro subscribers
| - ditch API bills_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356016 - March 2025
| (3 comments)
| delegate wrote:
| Soon more people will realize that they might not need software
| written by others at all.
|
| You chat with an AI and have a working app in minutes.
|
| I've been building about 1 app per week lately and they're not
| trivial apps. They have UI, backend, database, audio, etc.
|
| One fact checks audio in real time, another does semantic search
| for song lyrics.
|
| A real-time translator, which translates the text to Spanish as
| I'm typing. I needed it to better communicate with a Tinder date.
| It has a nice javafx UI. It didn't occur to me to look for a
| translator app, since those come with
| restrictions/registration/ads/etc.
|
| This is possible today. Give it a bit more time and it will be
| able to clone any existing app.
|
| The question 'what are we going to do then?' visits me more often
| lately.
| owebmaster wrote:
| > The question 'what are we going to do then?' visits me more
| often lately.
|
| We will develop a new layer of profitable apps. Social apps
| will not stop to be a thing but it will be easy to create
| engaging ones.
| Elbouyave wrote:
| Someone know if a good support to learn MCP on Windows ? I can't
| really find strong comprehensive infos, lectures or video on this
| topic.
| ezyang wrote:
| Most of the problem is installing the MCP servers, which is
| more annoying on Windows.
| https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp#getting-started has
| instructions that I've personally tested for installation on
| Windows, which might help you out some.
| DavidPP wrote:
| On my end, I use https://github.com/skydeckai/mcp-server-aidd,
| which has
|
| - File manipulation - Directory manipulation - tree-sitter
| integration
|
| and more.
|
| I also installed Tavily Search, sequential thinking, and
| Playwright.
|
| I still use Cursor for development, and I use Claude Desktop for
| higher-level documentation, testing, etc.
|
| For example, I'll check out a new repo that is lacking in
| documentation. I'll get the app running, then explain to Claude
| where the code lives, how to access the real app, and how I want
| the features documented.
|
| Then Claude will happily scan the codebase, take screenshots of
| the running app, etc., all by himself, and then create a report
| (through the artifact system) with visualizations, graphs, etc.
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(page generated 2025-03-19 23:01 UTC)