How to Evaluate a Server You've Found
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How to Evaluate a Server You’ve Found
Before installing anything, run through these questions:
Who built it and when? Official Anthropic reference servers are a safe bet. Servers from companies with reputations at stake (Notion, Linear, GitHub) are generally maintained. A random GitHub repo from eight months ago with no recent commits is a gamble.
What permissions does it need? Read-only access to a data source is much lower risk than write access. Full account access to your email is very different from read access to a specific folder. Understand what you’re granting.
Does it follow the env variable pattern for credentials? If the setup instructions tell you to put an API key in the args array, that’s a red flag. Credentials belong in the env block of your settings.json, not in the args where they can show up in process listings.
Is the tool set sensible? A calendar server with fifty tools is suspicious. Either it’s trying to do too much or the developer didn’t think carefully about what should be exposed. A focused server with five to ten well-named tools is more trustworthy.
Does it work with a simple test? Install it, ask Claude what tools it has, run one simple operation. If the first call fails or returns gibberish, don’t invest time tuning it — find a better option.