We use AskElephant to record client calls, and we work in claude.ai. Those two things could not talk to each other, and the reason is structural rather than a missing feature.
AskElephant ships an MCP server. It runs locally over stdio, which serves Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and Windsurf. A browser cannot spawn a process on your laptop, so claude.ai needs an MCP server at an HTTPS address. That is a different program.
Building it took about a day. Working out what it should refuse to do took considerably longer, and that part generalises to any MCP server sitting in front of a large corpus. The code is on GitHub.
The arithmetic that determines the design
Before writing tools, measure your payload. We measured every transcript in our account: 3,706 engagements, 2,230 of which carry one.
