[HN Gopher] Show HN: Codemcp - Claude Code for Claude Pro subscr...
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Show HN: Codemcp - Claude Code for Claude Pro subscribers - ditch
API bills
Hi all! I normally work on the PyTorch project but I've been on
baby leave for the past month, so I've been playing around with AI
as a user rather than a framework implementor. I really liked the
agent experience with Claude Code, but I couldn't really justify
spending so many dollars on API costs for random side projects. I
already pay for a Claude Pro subscription though, and it turns out
you can simulate many of Claude Code's features with an MCP. If you
have a Pro subscription, check this out! I think it really captures
the Claude Code experience quite well, without forcing you to pay
for API tokens.
Author : ezyang
Score : 154 points
Date : 2025-03-13 18:29 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| 0xcb0 wrote:
| Hey there, excited first time user here. Thanks for creating
| this!
|
| I started playing around with it yesterday evening. Running
| Claude Desktop under manjaro linux with some tweaks, I did
| managed to activate codemcp.
|
| As I am also quite new with mcp and how to proper use the
| protocol in tools, I am not sure I did everything correct. I did
| also install filesystem, git, github and sequential-thinking
| along side.
|
| However, git will not work. The addition of the mcp git server
| might not be needed? But without it, it did also not work
|
| However, what it has done so far is mind blowing. I did create a
| long query the other day about a project idea. This generated a
| road map, detailed implementation instruction, guidlines, all
| that is needed to complete the problem. I let it Claude Desktop
| read in the files with help of codemcp.
|
| Claude Dekstop have been working for multiple hours before I seem
| to have hot some kind of limit. I now get the message to type
| continue, but it always start the with the same task.
|
| And what it has been created is awesome. The frontend is nearly
| finished, but it lacked to create the startup code first. Overall
| I am blow away what I can do with mcp and esp. with this small
| lib the author has created here. Code quality is good and event
| though I had multiple limits, where I needed to type continue,
| the code is logically make sense. Really good!
|
| I also do not yet know how I can continue a old session.
|
| P.S. @anthropic, If you are reading this. I really do not want to
| abuse your service. Please, instead of giving me no answer, or
| beeing stuck in an infinite loop, give me a proper return code
| and a error, that I reached my limit for the next X minutes or
| so. I would really love this
| ezyang wrote:
| I'm surprised you managed to get Desktop running on Linux lol.
| You don't need the filesystem/git MCPs alongside codemcp; in
| fact, it's better not to have them so that Claude consistently
| uses' codemcp's equivalents to do edits. I'm not sure why
| codemcp's built-in git support did not work; you can probably
| find out more by looking in .codemcp/codemcp.log.
|
| If you need to start a new chat, it works just fine. Tell
| Claude what's happened so far and what you want it to do. You
| can also ask Claude to summarize the old conversation, that's
| how /compact in claude code works too.
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing thread:
|
| _Hacking Your Own AI Coding Assistant with Claude Pro and MCP_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410866
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I've been using it for the past hour or so.
|
| I told it to make a TODO list (based on my instructions) and now
| I'm just repeatedly creating a new chat just saying 'work on the
| todo list'. The thing I'm giving it to do is pretty easy (fix
| some React components to add types and replace hardcoded strings
| with props). Doing the same thing in Cursor was annoying, due to
| the chatter, and the fact I had to click 'Accept all'.
|
| For single file changes, it's nice. I haven't tried it with more
| complex things yet.
| ezyang wrote:
| In my experience, the model is king, and codemcp will operate
| fairly similarly to Cursor with the same failure modes as
| Cursor due to Sonnet 3.7. One thing that I like about codemcp
| is I can customize aspects of the interaction as I discover new
| things I want to do :)
| Seanambers wrote:
| Why are people not using plugins like Cline?!
| eogrok wrote:
| Cline also requires the use of an API key, preferably from
| Anthropic. I found its results to be much better than running a
| DeepSeek-Llama 70b locally.
| ezyang wrote:
| Cline has famously huge API token costs as it is profligate
| with context. Because codemcp plugs into Claude Desktop you
| only pay for your Claude Pro sub, similar to Cursor's pricing
| model
| _jayhack_ wrote:
| This is true and is essentially a form of arbitrage.
| Anthropic is eating the cost of your elevated queries with
| their $20 flat fee subscription.
|
| The "famously huge API token costs" you are referring to is
| Cline passing the Anthropic API cost through to you with no
| markup. You even input your own API token.
| geden wrote:
| Cline is great in terms of VS Code integration but was costing
| me about $5 an hour in API tokens working on a small two page
| next.js webapp.
| devit wrote:
| This requires an MCP-compliant client, for which Claude Desktop
| seems to be the main (or only?) choice.
|
| Note that Claude Desktop can be run on Linux using
| https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian, which
| repackages the Windows version to run on Linux (it's an Electron
| app, so it just needs to stub out the native interface, which
| seems mostly for cosmetic things).
|
| It would be really nice though if the web versions of Claude,
| ChatGPT, etc. added MCP support directly: this should be
| achievable with help from a WebExtension and a native binary to
| proxy messages from the WebExtension to the MCP server.
|
| It should also be possible to write such a WebExtension by a
| third-party (that injects messages in the conversation), although
| it's possible the LLM companies might block it.
| gatienboquet wrote:
| You can build your own MCP client
| https://modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/client
|
| You will need an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY though.
| etwigg wrote:
| Cline is another client. They even have a marketplace of MCP
| server extensions which you can use with Cline or Claude
| Desktop. https://cline.bot/mcp-marketplace
| devit wrote:
| I can report that I tried this setup (Claude Desktop on Linux +
| codemcp) on the Rust uutils repo asking it to add a "--repeat"
| option to cat to repeat the output N times (without telling it
| anything else), and it has generated a commit that looks
| plausible, correctly locating the implementation file and unit
| test file and changing them in an apparently correct way (other
| than mangling a commit just before the code changing \\\n to
| \n).
|
| It did require to manually enter "continue" in Claude's chat
| (and to approve the use of codemcp at the start), but it
| otherwise did everything automatically.
|
| It seems to work.
|
| codemcp automatically produces and commits a single git commit
| which also contains commit hashes for a bunch of other commits
| that contain a subset of the changes.
| _jayhack_ wrote:
| Codegen is an MCP client that you can trigger via Slack:
| codegen.com
| Flux159 wrote:
| I just made an open source CLI based chat client that supports
| MCP servers to solve this problem yesterday at
| https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-chat.
|
| The issue I faced during MCP server development of my
| Kubernetes MCP server (https://github.com/Flux159/mcp-server-
| kubernetes) is that I wanted to be able to easily test changes
| to the server without having to deal with Claude Desktop.
| Realized that I could make a simple CLI client that lets me
| automate some of the testing & it just happened to also be a
| decent terminal based chat client for any production MCP
| servers too. Requires using your own Anthropic API key, but
| other than that it should "just work".
| ezyang wrote:
| One thing I'll say, is that if I was going to make people pay
| API costs (like cline/claude code) I probably wouldn't actually
| make an MCP. The MCP box is pretty limiting, and I'm only
| willing to pay the cost because that's how I get onto flat
| pricing structure.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| I haven't tried it, but another one might be 5ire, seems to be
| able to use mcp.
| smcleod wrote:
| There's so many MCP clients out there, Cline is IMO the best
| agentic coding tool that makes heavy use of it.
| ezyang wrote:
| When I posted this to Reddit there was a pretty lively discussion
| there: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/s/wRmnREUWzn
| siliconc0w wrote:
| It'd be really nice if the AI providers just discounted API
| tokens against your subscriptions so they were in-effect just
| pre-paying for (ideally a discounted) set amount of tokens.
| trash_cat wrote:
| I am using Windsurf and consistently running low Flex credits and
| was looking into MCP for local file editing.
|
| Would be interested in hearing what you learned creating Codemcp,
| how you find MCP as a protocol, and something else that you found
| interesting doing your project.
| ezyang wrote:
| So I have liked the Claude Pro style rate limiting over credits
| that refresh monthly but mostly because I only get snatches of
| 1-2 hours while I am on baby leave so I never actually get rate
| limited. As for learnings, I put a lot of them in my AI
| Blindspots blog, cuz I did most of codemcp's dev with LLMs
| pzo wrote:
| Do you think it should be possible to make some plugin for
| cline or roo code that would as a proxy between and Claude
| Pro and your mcp? This way we could avoid using Claude
| desktop and still code in IDE - i just find UI in Claude very
| fugly.
| keyle wrote:
| Side question, isn't this against their terms and conditions?
| ezyang wrote:
| No, in fact, codemcp can be thought of as a fancier version of
| the official filesystem MCP that Anthropic released. It's 100%
| MCP.
| lanza wrote:
| Only gripe I have with the tool is that once you've gotten a
| country right a few times it zooms in too far. I still had no
| clue where Eritrea was after getting it right like four times.
| Just got lucky.
|
| But now that the map only shows me three possible countries I can
| trivially remember which one it was. Ask me again tomorrow while
| only showing me the full map and I might guess it's in South
| America.
| whiskeytuesday wrote:
| Wrong thread?
| password4321 wrote:
| TIL: Model Context Protocol (MCP)
| mulmboy wrote:
| Nice
|
| btw with claude desktop you can easily hack it to auto-allow MCP,
| save yourself from clicking "allow" all the time. Dangerous of
| course if you auto-approve write actions!
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1h9harx/auto_appr...
| chaosprint wrote:
| I was wondering if I could use Claude Desktop to control VS Code
| directly (perhaps a plugin in it) so that I only need to open two
| windows.
| DavidPP wrote:
| Goose from Block is also a client that supports MCP. It can be
| used both with UI or as a CLI: https://block.github.io/goose/
| navs wrote:
| I accidentally realized I could do this with their official
| filesystem server and it works ok. Certainly haven't felt the
| need to use Claude code or cline since.
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(page generated 2025-03-20 23:02 UTC)