Using Your Notes With Claude via MCP

AI assistants become far more useful when they can see the context you already keep in your notes. The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is a standard way to give an assistant like Claude carefully scoped access to tools and data on your own machine.

What is MCP?

MCP is an open protocol introduced by Anthropic for connecting AI assistants to external tools and data sources. An application exposes an MCP server that describes the actions it supports, such as "search notes" or "create note". An MCP-aware client, such as Claude Desktop or Claude Code, can then call those actions while you chat. A local server can communicate over standard input and output (stdio), so the connection stays on your computer.

Why connect your notes?

• Ask questions of your own material: "What did we decide about the launch date?" can be answered from your meeting notes.
• Summarise and tidy: ask Claude to summarise a long note, or suggest tags and a clearer title.
• Capture as you go: have Claude create a new note from a conversation, or append action items to an existing one.
• Plan work: ask for a list of notes with upcoming due dates or everything still in progress.

Privacy points to consider

When an assistant reads a note to answer your question, the content of that note is sent to the assistant as part of the conversation. Think about what you keep in the notes you connect, and use tools that let you see and control what actions are available. A local-first notes app keeps the stored notes on your own device; only what Claude reads during a conversation becomes part of that chat.

Good habits

• Write descriptive titles and use tags, so searches return the right notes.
• Ask Claude to show which notes it used, and check important answers yourself.
• Review changes Claude makes to notes, just as you would a colleague's edits.

Setting it up with GlissNotes

GlissNotes is a free, local-first Markdown notes app for Mac, Windows, the web and Android, and every desktop install also works as an MCP server. From its Claude & MCP settings you can add it to Claude Desktop or Claude Code, after which Claude can list and search notes, read them, create or append to notes, and update titles, tags, status and due dates, working in the same notes you edit yourself.