Weekly Pulse: Audio, Codebase Context, HubSpot

The MCP community has been working hard over the holidays: over 80 new servers have been released since our previous, first ever newsletter went out last Sunday morning!

Did we miss something this week? Notice something interesting you want to make sure we cover next time? Shoot us a note, we love feedback.

Featured Servers We Like

mcpx: Server that discovers and runs other servers
→ After you hook it up to a client like Claude, the server will automatically "search for tools that solve the user's problem" as you interact with Claude. Currently, it will only surface servers that have been registered as "servlets" on the mcp.run platform (of which there are about 40); so developers would do well to get their servers registered to unlock this adoption channel.

LLM Code Context (100+ downloads/day): Chat with your own codebase
→ Point it to your codebase's root directory, and let it intelligently decide what files to pull into context while you chat with it regarding your codebase. Combine with Filesystem and CLI from last week's highlights to create a powerful coding assistant.

Pandoc Converter (100+ downloads/day): Convert file formats between PDF, HTML, Markdown, plain text, and more
→ Robust server that we're seeing consistent usage on. Combine with something like Fetch or Browserbase to retrieve web page content and save in the file format you prefer.

PubMed (50+ downloads/day): Pull biomedical literature into your conversations
→ It's hard to trust base AI models for medical advice. While it's still no replacement for a doctor, increase the confidence of Claude's medical answers by getting answers augmented by PubMed citations.

Brave Search (250+ downloads/day): Connect Claude to the open internet
→ Brave Search has a nice free tier for personal usage, so this reference MCP server implementation has proven to be an easy way to give Claude access to searchable public data (like current events, sports stats and schedules, etc).

New & Trending Servers This Week

ElevenLabs (Sat, Dec 21) by @mamertofabian
→ Easily generate high quality audio via ElevenLabs from text snippets and scripts. Turn a blog post you like into a smooth-talking podcast. Get started with this detailed demo video. Mamerto, the creator, also made an MCP client to pair with it as an alternative to Claude; a great example of how Claude isn't always the best app through which to access MCP servers.

HubSpot (Fri, Dec 27) by @buryhuang
→ Analyze and make tweaks to your HubSpot CRM data by chatting with it.

WordPress (Wed, Dec 25) by @emzimmer
→ Manage a WordPress site? Never deal with the clunky admin interface again: just use Claude to nicely format your next blog post or update all your SEO meta tags in one conversation.

Government Grants (Sun, Dec 22) by @Tar-ive
→ If you're an organization that regularly seeks out government grants, give this server a try to easily sift through the Simpler Grants API database.

CCTX (Wed, Dec 25) by @Nayshins
→ Crypto traders and investors can get real-time & historical cryptocurrency data from any exchange (e.g. Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and more) via this CCTX MCP server.

Review more recent releases.

A Few Good Links

→ LangChain published a State of AI 2024 report based on internal usage data. Many interesting findings; one that sticks out for MCP's is that 21.9% of traces now involve tool calls, with over 30% in recent months, up from an average of 0.5% in 2023. The idea of integrating external services with LLMs - MCP's bread and butter - is a booming trend.

→ Google released a report of 321 real-world gen AI use cases. If you're looking for ideas to build on top of MCP's, scour this list and double click wherever you have some expertise.

→ Anthropic made a goldmine of a post on building effective agents that has been making the internet rounds. Filled with learnings from their work with clients, they eloquently highlight the difference between Workflows and Agents, how to keep things simple so you don't have to use either, and a whole lot more.

→ You might have noticed Smithery.ai getting some traction on MCP server README's. If you're running into subtle configuration issues getting tools to load in Claude, using the Smithery CLI tool (i.e. commands that start with "npx -y @smithery/cli") can help you shortcut the manual configuration.

→ Docker Inc. stepped in to make official Docker images for Anthropic's reference servers. It's nice to see industry behemoths collaborating on MCP; and maybe using the Docker CLI will pick up some steam over the more fragmented uvx/npx approach to running servers locally.

→ The crowded space of trying to solve "MCP server management" is heating up. Besides mcp.run (from our features above), there's also Toolhouse, mcp-manager, Toolbase, mcp-server-manager, mcphub, mcp-registry, mcp-compass, and resource-hub-server.

Cheers,
Mike, Tadas, and Ravina