Top MCP's You Should be Using for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini

0:28Welcome to the podcast. inside of it. Now, I had a lot of people asking me number one, how MCPs work, what MCPs are, what the difference between MCP and API is. So I want to make an episode where I'm going to say some of the cool functionality that I've created with AI box and some of the cool things I've learned on the journey there. But I'm also going to break down for anyone curious what the top MCPs are that you should be using with Claude or whatever AI tools and assistance you're building with, and how these MCPs and APIs actually work with the differences between them and how you can get the most out of them.

0:58So as just two seconds of background, I'm sure most of you know, but just to define the terms and explain what an API is, it's basically the way for one piece of software to talk to another piece of software. And the difference between an AI and an API and an MCP is that an MCP is basically a standard way for an AI assistant, you can think of something like Claude, to basically discover and use tools, any apps, any files that are inside of a database or inside of a service. So an API, a lot of times, not always, it's kind of like, I guess a good analogy for this is kind of a universal adapter, right?

1:30So every country in the world has a different outlet plug. That's kind of like an API. It's kind of like a very specific way to use their software. And an MCP is more like a universal adapter that will fit into any of those plugs because the way an MCP works is it's basically kind of like a document page. It's basically an explanation to something like Claude of all of the ways that your API or all the ways your software operates and how you can interact with it versus like an API was like very structured, very rigid. And as an example from something I've built, I, you know, I recently built a tool that helped me with posting some of my podcast episodes, but I have three different podcast distribution companies that I use.

2:10I use rss.com. I use a cast. I use art 19. All of them have APIs that help me with my podcast publishing. So a way for me to upload an episode to my platform and have it go and publish it onto one of those distribution networks. But the problem is every single one of those APIs, like the way they work, the way that you integrate them into software is different. So what all of those companies do and what everyone has done with APIs, they've always kind of published a documents page that explains how you structure your API calls, how you have to give them code, how they'll give you code back. And if you have anything wrong in that code that you send them, you get back, it crashes and breaks and the API doesn't work.

2:46So it's been pretty, you know, it's frustrating. And a lot of times when I was first building with tools with Claude and building, you know, that particularly that use case, that podcast distribution tool that I created, I would literally say, hey, Claude, here's my API, which I'll tell you why that's a bad thing in the future. But I'd say, here's my API key. And here is a link to their documents page. Read this entire page of context, pages and pages to figure out how the heck their API works to integrate it. And it still wouldn't work all the time. we'd have to do tons of tests. Sometimes I have to get on with their customer support and then have to look at what I was doing and looking at my code errors and Claude was telling me stuff.

3:20And anyways, nightmare. So then we have a beautiful, you know, solution, which is an MCP, which is basically they give you a link that you can give Claude that thoroughly helps it understand how your API works. And newsflash, MCP is also leveraging an API a lot of the time, but it's basically the universal adapter to explain to the AI agent how to successfully use these APIs and it's a standardized way to do it. So now instead of struggling with an API and trying to figure out how to work with a software, you just give the MCP link to your AI agent and it will figure it all out for you. You don't have to finick with anything anymore.

3:54And it's really easy to set up an MCP, by the way, in Claude. And I didn't really realize this. I think a lot of us have probably done this before with Claude or with ChatGPT where you go to the connectors panel, right? And it shows you like, hey, look, here's like 20 different softwares that integrate with Cloud or with ChatGPT or Gemini. And I'll be honest, like when I first saw all of the list of connectors on Cloud, I was kind of disappointed. I'm like, oh, yeah, there's 20 things here. I might use like three of them, like Gmail and Slack and Google Drive. But like, I don't really use all of these other random things.

4:20And there's tons of, you know, software that I like and I use, but it wasn't listed on there, right? Like, for example, my email newsletter software, Beehive, like it's just not, you know, they didn't have that. And so Beehive actually went and created the very own MCP. And it's a link you can get, but it's not inside of the Cloud connections kind of, um, kind of like a store or whatever. So what you can do, it's actually super easy. You grab that link from beehive, you click add your own connection, you paste that link in, and it's going to have a pop-up come up on your screen that asks you to log into, uh, your account on beehive, or you could do this also with AI box.

4:54So you put the AI box MCP Lincoln as a pop-up that says log into your AI box account. You log in just like it, like a login with Google kind of thing. And all of a sudden that is how it authenticates. And now it knows that, um, it has your login credentials and it's using those and it has this MCP link. So understands how to interact with your software and you're off to the races at this point. You don't need to do anything. You don't need to mess around with APIs or figure out how anything works. You can just tell Claude, Hey, go to beehive and, uh, you know, help me figure out my analytics for my newsletter that I've been publishing or go to AI box and build a tool that can help me automate, um, generating thumbnails much faster.

5:27Just a PSA. If you use Claude, uh, Claude cowork or Claude code, and you'd like to be able to work with all of the tools that you have. There's probably MCPs for all of the different software you use. You just have to go and manually connect it. You just have to go Google, you know, like Vercel MCP URL and you go get that and manually add it. So anyways, hope this was useful. Honestly, it has 10x what I've been capable of doing with a Claude. And so in the case of AI Box, what you can do with it, you go and add the AI Box MCP URL, you go and authenticate and log in, And then you're able to, anytime you build like a tool on AI box, if you've built like an image generator or like a newsletter generator or, you know, some sort of like audio or video generation, you know, creating ad assets like a tool, you know, you can build those kind of no code tools on AI box with all the different AI models.

6:16If you've created something like that, you can go to Claude and say, hey Claude, I need to go and generate like 10 new images for my Facebook ad campaign for my product XYZ. Go and use my box over on AI Box and you say the name of the box to generate 10 new things and make sure that they have like this new direction or this new style or theme that we're thinking of or this new product. And it will go and access that box on AI Box because it has the MCP connection. It will generate your assets and then it will let you know and give you links back to your assets where you can go download the images or videos or whatever you've created.

6:52Or if it's text, I think we might even pour it straight into your chat message so you can see it right there. So that's how it works with AI Box. I'm really super excited about it. And by the way, if you haven't tried out something like this, MCPs are really useful specifically if you have to do, you know, generations that have many, many different iterations. And so an example of this, I was recently creating a Bible study app, and I wanted it so you could tap on any verse in the Bible and get it to, you know, like, give me the background, give me the explanation, give me the context of this verse, like, explain this verse to me.

7:24I feel like very often I'm reading something, I have no idea what it's saying, right? And so what I did is I had Claude go and generate an explanation for every single verse in the Bible. Now, the problem with that is there is like 30 to 45 ,000 verses in the Bible, in the Old and New Testament. It is insane. And generating that takes a very long time. And I wanted these to be really high quality generations. I talked about the historical context and all this stuff, right? So I had this massive project. I wanted Claude to do it. And the problem was I would say, like, okay, go do these generations.

7:53And it would be like, okay, it's going to take me like two days to do them. And I'm like, okay, you know, I just have to keep like clean, continue, continue, continue every like couple hours when it does a new batch. The problem was sometimes my computer would get shut off. Sometimes the internet would cut out. Sometimes Claude would just, you know, like their connection would sever their servers would sever sometimes I'd hit a rate limit whatever there's a hundred different reasons why halfway through a generation of a batch it would just crash and what happens when it would crash is I would basically lose the entire generation so it could be running for an hour crash at minute 50 and I would lose like half or all of everything it was generating it was very frustrating so what I'm able to do is go create a box on AI box where it's just like the MD file that you're giving Claude to do the project.

8:37And in fact, you can take that MD file and bring it over to AI Box and just give it a prompt in the Vibe Builder to create that tool. But I created a box in AI Box that can generate these verse descriptions. And then over on Claude, I say, hey, look, I need to go generate like 30 ,000 of these verse descriptions, use this particular box to do it. And a couple things, it's capable of doing a couple things. Number one, because it's running the processing on AI Box, you can instead of having to wait two days for it to generate everything, it technically could open, you know, a hundred or a thousand or, you know, 20 ,000 instances of AI box and get to generate all of them in parallel at once.

9:14So number one, that saves you a ton of time rather than having to wait for Claude to do it one by one. You could just have AI box, you know, do a million of them in parallel, not literally a million, but a ton of them in parallel. And number two, if it, if any of them crashes or particularly if Claude crashes in the middle of any of these generations, AI Box still has all of your assets saved over there. So, you know, let's say like Claude crashed and it's like, oh shoot, I crashed. You're like, okay, great. Well, AI Box has them all generated. There's a documents folder. There's a file section over on AI Box.

9:46You can actually go and access everything that has been created on any boxes or tools on AI Box. So nothing is a lost in the case of a lot of my generations. And it's not the end of the world when it's, you know, trying to generate like some piece of text, but I was doing something very similar with 11 Labs where I was generating like a whole bunch of sleep history podcast episodes. It's a new thing I was trying. Someone in my studio wanted a new project. So we generated a bunch of sleep history podcast episodes. They're like two to four hours long, and I had a ton of free credits from 11 Labs that they were giving me, and they were worth thousands of dollars.

10:21And so I spent about$1 ,200 unbeknownst to me because I told like my AI generation tool to like go generate these podcasts, put them in a specific folder. I was using Claude and it crashed at some point in that generation. I had like an API, but it all crashed. And I said, you know, what's the status of it? And it's like, oh, shoot. Yeah, we crashed generating all of these things. Your 11 Labs API crashed. And so we actually don't have anything saved. And I'm like, okay, well, how many like had we generated? I think it had got stuck on a loop or a glitch. Something happened. And it's like, okay, well, we actually spent about$1 ,200 of credits on 11 labs.

10:59But yeah, it all crashed and we don't have any of that. So that was a very painful experience to just lose$1 ,200 for no reason. I mean, for the crashes and it was unrecoverable. If you had done that with AI Box, right? So created a box on AI Box that had an MD file, had an explanation of the type of, you know, the sleep history podcast that I was going to create. And you all you have to do is just give it the title of the episode. And then it will write the whole episode and generate it and give you your audio file. If you've done that with AI box, then there wouldn't be the crashing. And if Claude crashed for any reason, AI box would have safely generated and be able to get your asset.

11:34So instead of me saying, Oh, shoot, I just lost$1 ,200 of 11 labs generations, they would also even if Claude crashes, they would also be safe on AI box. So this is what we're trying to build with the MCP, we're basically trying to make it your pipelines of AI content much more reliable. And at the same time, we're trying to make it so that if any crashes happen on Claude or on any of the software that you're vibe coding, if you have the engine of it being run on AI box, you never lose your assets, you never lose access to your assets. And of course, the other thing that people love about it is if you're creating tools that generate images, audio video, Claude just can't do that.

12:11It doesn't have the capabilities. And so if you create a box on AI box that can generate any of those assets, you can tell Claude to call it and to do it. And essentially you're able to generate, you know, images with Claude, which was never a capability that Claude had before. And it saves you a ton of time for, you know, whether that's generating images for, you know, graphics for your apps or for, you know, blog post titles, Like all if you look at AI chat daily.com, my AI news site, all of the title or all of the banner images and all of the articles are AI generated. And using something like AI box to generate them helps it to be super consistent.

12:47And then we don't have that crashing issue. Okay. And of course, also, we give chat or Claude the ability to generate images, which it didn't even have before. Okay, I want to talk about some of the top most used MCP tools that are out there. There's really interesting, there's some interesting leaderboards, MCP leaderboards, which are great places to see what ones are actually very useful. Sometimes a company will come out with an MCP, but it doesn't have all of the capabilities of their platform. And, you know, I hate to, I hate to bag on like Beehive because I love that platform for email sending, but their MCP only gives you data about the platform.

13:19It doesn't actually help you post to the platform yet. And they're like, they're working on it. So there's some, you know, that sometimes the functionality isn't completely there of everything you could do if you were just on the website. But I did want to say some of my favorite MCPs I use and talk about some of the other more popular ones. The number one is that I'm using is the GitHub MCP. And that can also I think it's like built into Claude. So you probably see that one. You probably don't have to go get a custom connection for it. But I have everything. If you're going to be developing anything, I recommend getting something like Vercel or Netlify MCP and getting Supabase and then getting GitHub and connecting that stack.

13:53You can essentially log into all your accounts and anything you want to build, Claude can go and set up your database. It can set up your hosting and it can set up, you know, where you store your code, which is GitHub and what you're working through. So just those three are basically the most popular ones that I personally am using. I love some of the Google Connection ones that are able to do something like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive and interact with all of those for me. And those are also super popular. And then a couple that I was seeing people recommend online that are really useful are one of them being Brave Search.

14:23It's, I think, one of the most popular web search MCPs. Basically, the AI can get past any sort of training cutoff and can find current library releases or CVEs. Figma has one, which is interesting when it comes to working between design and code. Canva has some version of this. And then I think Notion, a lot of people use Notion. If you have that, it's a great way to connect AI to some of your workspaces for syncing your knowledge bases, your documents, and a bunch of your tasks. Now, there's tons of places that you can plug this into. You can plug these all into Cursor, Cloud Desktop, Gemini, I think Grok and a bunch of others.

14:57So lots of different places to give these MCPs to and lots of different software. But honestly, chances are if you have software that you use specifically in your industry and it's not, you know, some super niche software and even honestly, a lot of super niche software even too, it will have an MCP built out for it. So go check, just Google MCP for your software, see if it's there and go and attach it. And basically you'll, you know, save yourself. if you're using something like cloud cowork, like, yes, you can get around this. And I do this all the time where like, it'll say, Hey, I don't have like the even sometimes I have the MCP, for example, to like super base my database.

15:28And it's like, Hey, I don't have like the permission to edit this one particular thing. Can you get me logging or this like, you know, specific credential key. And I don't really want to mess around with it. I'm like, Look, it's just logged in on my browser, control my computer screen on my browser, go click and figure it out yourself. And it can go do that. So that is one way to get around some of these MCPs and logins. But if you don't want to have to do that. And if you're using a lot of different things, or you have repetitive workflows, getting the MCPs, and having it connect with them, number one uses less tokens for you because computer use where it's like looking at your computer and moving it around and screenshotting it all the time.

15:59That's super it uses a ton of tokens. So if you want to use less tokens, I would get the MCP. If you want to make it more consistent, I'd get the MCP. It has less issues and glitches. And if you're doing, you know, pipelines and other things that are repeated tasks, I would definitely get MCPs for anything you're using. All right, I hope that was a useful episode. If you want to get access to the AI box MCP, it's$8 a month over on AI box.ai, you sign up for an account. And then in your settings, you can grab the MCP link, you can go to Claude, give that to Claude, and it will get that get that set up.

16:29So you can access any of the tools you build on AI box, and you get 80 plus different AI models now built into Claude or chat GPT or Gemini using that. So if you want to go check that out, it's AI box.ai slash MCP. That's a page I created that will explain a little bit about how it works and how you connect it. There's a little diagram on there. Hope that is incredibly useful, unlocks all the capabilities of what you'd like to do with Claude. Hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day and I'll catch you all in the next episode.