Simon Willison's TIL: Wiring a Custom MCP Server Into the Claude and ChatGPT Chat Interfaces Is Possible but 'Can Take Quite a Few Steps'
Simon Willison TIL·medium signal
Willison published a July 29 walkthrough for connecting a custom Model Context Protocol server to the standard consumer chat UIs of both Claude and ChatGPT — not the developer APIs or CLI harnesses where MCP is well-trodden, but the plain chat surfaces most users actually live in. His summary judgment is the finding: it works, and it 'can take quite a few steps.' That friction gap is worth knowing before you plan any distribution strategy that assumes end users will attach your MCP server themselves; the protocol's ergonomics are still tuned for developer harnesses, not for the chat product.