Claude Code, Beyond the Prompt — Part 4: Your First MCP Server (Give Claude Safe Hands on Your Own Tools)

Short summary

Part 4 of a series on running a live automated trading system on Claude Code, this installment introduces MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that let Claude call your own tools directly instead of copy-pasting between terminal and chat. The author walks through a minimal read-only SQL query tool with safety guards (SELECT-only, row limits, timeouts) and explains how they scaled to ~30 sandboxed, logged tools covering logs, health checks, deploys, and GitHub issues. The key insight: you define the blast radius, every call is auditable, and Claude gets structured data without lossy human relay.

• •MCP servers let Claude call your own typed tools directly, eliminating copy-paste relay
• •Safety guards (SELECT-only, row limits, timeouts, path-traversal blocking) are the core value, not incidental
• •Author scaled from one read-only DB query tool to ~30 sandboxed, logged tools for real infrastructure operations

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