MCP servers in Claude Code: the minimal setup, and when you should skip MCP entirely

Most MCP setup guides start with a wall of JSON. You don't need it. Claude Code can register an MCP server with one CLI command, and for a lot of teams the right number of MCP servers is zero — a shell command in a rules file does the same job with less context overhead. This is the minimal path, the config that actually gets written to disk, and the handful of failure modes that account for almost every "my server doesn't show up" thread.

The two-command happy path

For a local (stdio) server, this is the whole setup:

claude mcp add github -- npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-github

Enter fullscreen mode