MCP Tools

🎥 Video lesson — video not yet migrated (source Skool video id: aaabfbda3c3a4cb69839bf6f7abbf1ea).

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's a way to give Claude Code access to external apps and services — your email, calendar, lead scraping tools, databases. You configure an MCP once, and Claude Code can talk to that service whenever it needs to. Think of it as giving your assistant the login credentials to the tools you use daily.

The distinction people get confused about: a skill tells Claude Code WHAT to do (instructions, a process, steps). An MCP tells Claude Code WHERE to reach (a live connection handling authentication and API calls). Completely different things working in completely different ways.

Here's the tradeoff. Every MCP you have configured takes up space in your context window before you even start working. Claude Code needs to know what tools are available, and that information sits in memory permanently. Skills don't have this problem — only the short description loads at start, full instructions load on demand. This is why the recommended approach is to minimize installed MCPs. Instead of having a Gmail MCP constantly consuming context, take the MCP documentation, give it to Claude Code, and ask it to create a skill that makes the same API calls directly. Same result, fraction of the context cost. This works great for simple integrations — email, lead enrichment, scraping, analytics. For more complex integrations, sometimes the MCP is still the better choice.