Connecting your own assistant

Your assistant (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Visual Studio Code, or any client that speaks MCP with a bearer token) can read and change your work as you, with your permissions. It needs two things: tokens allowed in the workspace, and a token of your own. Setting it up takes three steps: get a token, give your client the address and the token, ask it something.

Before you start

An administrator turns tokens on under Configuration → Access tokens, and may bound their lifetime or make every token read-only. Until then My profile → Access tokens says tokens are off.
Create a token under My profile → Access tokens (see Access tokens). Give it the name of the client that will hold it. Copy the secret when it is shown: it is shown once. A read-only token is the one to start with.
Each person connects with their own token. A token is never shared: what the assistant does is recorded under the name of the person whose token it holds.

Step 1: The address and the header

The server is the address you sign in at, followed by /mcp (see Your workspace's address). For a workspace at https://acme.mbovy.com, it is:

https://acme.mbovy.com/mcp

The token travels in one header of every request, the word Bearer, a space and the secret exactly as you copied it:

Authorization: Bearer pat_...

Step 2: Add the server to your client

Claude Code

In a terminal, once, with your own address and secret:

claude mcp add --transport http -s user mbovy https://acme.mbovy.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer pat_..."

claude mcp list then shows mbovy as connected, and /mcp inside a session lists its tools. -s user registers it for you in every folder; without it, the server is registered only for the folder you are in.

Claude Desktop and claude.ai

Open Settings → Connectors and choose Add custom connector.
Name: mbovy. URL: your address with /mcp.
Authentication: No sign in.
Under Request headers, add one header: name Authorization, value Bearer pat_....
Add it, then enable the connector in a chat from the tools menu.

Claude reaches your workspace from its own servers, so the workspace must be reachable from the internet; a hosted workspace is.

Cursor

Open Cursor Settings → Tools & MCP → New MCP server, which opens mcp.json, and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mbovy": {
      "url": "https://acme.mbovy.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer pat_..." }
    }
  }
}

Visual Studio Code

In .vscode/mcp.json of a workspace, or in your user mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "mbovy": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://acme.mbovy.com/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer pat_..." }
    }
  }
}

Other clients

Any client that takes a server of type streamable HTTP with an address and a header works the same way. A client that can only sign in through a web page cannot connect yet.

Step 3: Try it

Ask, in your own words:

Who am I in mbovy? The assistant answers with your name, your workspace and whether the token is read-only. If this works, everything else will.
What do I have overdue?
Count the open tasks by person.
Show task 112 with its comments.
Log 30 minutes on task 112 for today.

You never name a tool: the assistant picks one from the list below. Every answer carries a link to the item, so you can open it in the app and check what the assistant did.

What the assistant can do

Tool	What it does
`whoami`	Who you are, your workspace, your roles and permissions, and whether the token is read-only
`find_work_items`	Work items you can see, filtered by customer, project, person, status, priority, type, dates or words; at most 50, with the total
`get_work_item`	One item with its estimate and spent time, its sub-items and its latest comments
`work_counts`	Items counted by person, customer, project, status or priority; needs the permission to run reports
`my_week`	Your own logged time for a week, by item and day
`run_report`	A saved report by name, with a relative period or a date range; needs the permission to run reports
`list_customers`	Customers, by name
`create_task`	One task, phase or subtask under a project, phase or task you can edit
`set_status`	Moves one item to Draft, Open, InProgress, OnHold or Done
`add_time`	Adds minutes of your time to one item on one day
`add_comment`	One comment on an item, written as you

Nothing is deleted through a tool, no project is created, and every write changes one item. The permissions and the visibility are yours: an item you cannot open, the assistant cannot read either. With a read-only token the writing tools answer that they were not run. Each reading tool returns at most 50 rows and says the total, and each token may make a limited number of calls per minute; past it, the assistant is told to wait.

When it stops working

The assistant says	What happened	What to do
The server refused the connection, or unauthorized	The token expired, was revoked, or tokens are off in the workspace. A password change, or being signed out everywhere, also ends every token.	Create a new token under My profile → Access tokens and update the client. If tokens are off, ask an administrator.
The tool was not run because the token is read-only	The token, or the whole workspace, is read-only.	Create a token without read-only, if the workspace allows it.
The tool needs a permission you do not have	The same permission the screen would ask for, such as running reports.	Ask an administrator for the permission; the assistant has exactly yours.
Too many calls	More calls in a minute than one token may make.	Wait a minute.

Every refused use is in your Security log, with the reason.