Let any coding agent drive your editor

What is MCP?

What your agent can do

What it looks like in practice

You never call these tools yourself. You keep talking to your agent the way you already do — the difference is what it can see, and where its output arrives.

• Select a function in Incise and ask your agent to “explain this”. You don’t paste the code or name the file — it reads the selection from the editor.
• Ask where something is defined and the file opens in an Incise tab with the right lines already selected, instead of a path printed in your terminal.
• When the agent wants to change a file, a diff pane opens inside the Incise window with Accept and Reject buttons, and it waits for you. Accept and it applies the change; reject and it adapts.

There’s a fuller walkthrough, including what surprises people the first time, on the Claude Code page — the workflow is the same whichever agent you use.

Turning it on

1. In Incise, choose View ▸ Enable Agent Integration (MCP).
2. Open Settings ▸ Agents (⌘,). It shows the endpoint URL and a config snippet for each agent, with your token already in it.
3. Pick your agent, click Copy, and paste it where that agent keeps its MCP servers — the pane names the file.

Or let the agent do it. If that config file already exists and has other servers in it, merging by hand is the fiddly part. Click Copy Setup Prompt instead and paste the result into the agent itself — it edits its own config, merging the Incise entry in without disturbing what’s already there, and creating the file if it’s missing. Requires 1.12.16 or later.

Copying from Settings is easier than the samples below, because the token is filled in for you. The samples are here so you can see what you’re agreeing to before you install anything.

Setup by agent

claude mcp add --transport http incise \
  http://127.0.0.1:3845/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN"

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "incise": {
      "serverUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:3845/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

[mcp_servers.incise]
url = "http://127.0.0.1:3845/mcp"
http_headers = { "Authorization" = "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" }

{
  "servers": {
    "incise": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:3845/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "incise": {
      "url": "http://127.0.0.1:3845/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Two things worth knowing, both learned the hard way. Antigravity requires serverUrl and rejects the url / httpUrl spellings other clients use, so a snippet copied from one of them fails silently. And its CLI (agy) reads the user-level ~/.gemini/config/mcp_config.json; a project-level .agents/mcp_config.json was not picked up in testing.

Claude Code: two ways in

How it’s kept safe

• Off until you turn it on. No port is opened before that, and turning it off closes it immediately.
• Local only. The listener binds to 127.0.0.1, never to a public interface, so nothing off your Mac can reach it.
• Token on every request. A token unique to your install is required; anything without it is refused. Regenerate it whenever you like — that invalidates every client until you re-paste the config.
• Browsers can’t sneak in. Web pages can reach a local port, so requests carrying a foreign Origin are rejected outright.
• Nothing leaves your machine on Incise’s account. It makes no outbound connections. What your agent sends to its own model is that agent’s business, the same as when it reads files from disk.

Questions