Helpful MCP Servers
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol has made Claude Code my daily driver (sorry Aider). If you are unfamiliar, MCP is a specific interface definition that exposes a service as a tool for an MCP Client (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot).
I won't dig into the details of exactly how MCP works, but instead I want to provide a quick list of MCP servers that can expand your coding agent's capabilities.
Zen
Zen is awesome. It provides tools for your agent to get a second opinion from another model to handle a large refactor or to iterate on an idea. I briefly dabbled with a similar idea, and then I found Zen and promptly stopped development. It takes some getting used to how to trigger Zen, but I find myself using it a few times per coding session.
MCP Toolbox for Databases
Talk to your local database or to various Google data products, like BigQuery. I don't use much on my personal projects, however it is essential at my day job to help diagnose data issues and to understand relationships between tables. Recently, I used it to help me plan a refactor of an existing data model.
Context 7
Code documentation for many different libraries and frameworks available as plaintext. It works pretty well, but the interface seems to be a bit rough around the edges (I think it's case sensitive and there is no search feature). The promise of this one is huge and I look forward to seeing it develop.
Cloudflare
Documentation for Cloudflare available as a tool. Essential when dealing with Cloudflare specifically. I am using it on a project to help migrate from Pages to Workers.