[egamirorrim]

It's more like you want Claude to interact with X, and you go to see if there's an MCP server for it.

Claude could use the API directly but most MCP now comes with OAuth so you can let it act as you, in case API keys are hard to come by or chargeable. Sometimes with a good skill or a preconfigured CLI tool skills can be just as good if not far more powerful than an MCP server.

But the trigger you'd look for to decide to use an MCP is 'i wish Claude could access X'. My top examples:

- pulling designs from figma to implement them - fetching ticket context for a job from JIRA - getting a stack trace to investigate from Sentry