Anthropic

On Tuesday I did a talk to our internal AI group, along with talks by excellent colleagues, on Context Engineering. The very next day, Anthropic released a blog post on Effective harnesses for long-running agents and updated their prompting best practices guide. Note to Anthropic: please can you release relevant material the day before I do a talk rather than afterwards! I talked about managing context size, how LLM accuracy declines as the context window fills past 50% and my mental model of LLMs as amnesiac pedants, and how this drives Claude Code features like it’s heavy use of todo lists, summarising context into markdown files etc. ...

On Friday Simon Willison published a look at Jesse Vincent’s1 Superpowers plugin for Claude You can read Simon’s and Jesse’s posts to see what this super cool plugin does, but I wanted to understand how to create a plugin and this is quick summary of my notes. First up, Jesse uses a complex structure with three repos: Marketplace Plugin Skills It’s setup this way to allow for contributions, but if you just want to play with creating a plugin, it’s not needed. ...

Notes that I wrote for work on how to get started with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic code tool. Anthropic’s own documentation is good, but I wanted a single page that I could share with people to help them get rapidly up to speed. Once past this stage, their Claude code best practices page is excellent. Installation You’ll need to setup an API key to use it. Put this in $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY then run the installer: ...

Today’s fun is setting up the new Zapier MCP integration. This creates a MCP server that allows Claude Desktop or Cursor or anything else that supports MCP to call any Zaps Setting Up Zapier MCP Step 1: Install mcp-remote First, install the mcp-remote package using npm: npm install mcp-remote Step 2: Configure MCP Endpoint in Claude Desktop In Claude Desktop, you’ll need to add the Zapier MCP endpoint to your settings. Add the following configuration to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json ...

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model has access to its built in knowledge from training, but this only contains public information and will have a cut off date when the model was trained. To get around this, some tools have integrated web search that can add extra knowledge and/or the ability to import documents. But what if you want to talk to a database? Or files on disk? Or a knowledge base? Or … ...