Claude starts every conversation knowing nothing about you. MCP servers fix that - here's how the Model Context Protocol works and why it matters.
Claude is powerful. But out of the box, it knows nothing about you, your projects, your decisions, what you've been working on. Every conversation starts from scratch. That's where MCP servers come in. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic that lets AI assistants like Claude connect to external data sources and tools. Think of it as a USB port for AI: a standard interface that any tool can plug into, and any AI client can use.