The Categories That Matter
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The Categories That Matter
Calendar access is probably the highest-value integration for most people. When Claude can read your calendar, it can help you schedule, summarise your week, flag conflicts, and draft invites with accurate details. Without it, you’re constantly copying and pasting dates and times.
The options depend on what you use. For macOS users, mcp-fantastical (which I built) connects Claude to Fantastical, giving it read access to your calendar events without needing to deal with Google’s OAuth flow. If you’re on Google Calendar directly, Anthropic’s reference server @modelcontextprotocol/server-google-calendar handles the OAuth setup — it’s more involved to configure but works cross-platform.
Web search changes how Claude handles questions about current events or unfamiliar topics. Without it, Claude works from its training data. With a search server, it can check. The Brave Search MCP server (@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search) is the most practical option — it uses Brave’s API which has a free tier and doesn’t require a Google account.
File system access you’ve already set up from Module 2. Once you have it, Claude can read your local documents, search codebases, and write files directly rather than producing output you then have to copy somewhere.
GitHub is essential if you work with code. The GitHub MCP server gives Claude access to issues, pull requests, repository structure, and commit history. You ask “what PRs are open in this repo?” and Claude checks, rather than you switching to the browser, copying the list, and pasting it in.
Database access matters if you have data you regularly query. The SQLite server lets Claude run queries against local databases. For production databases you’d need more care about what access to grant — but for personal data stores, analytics databases, or anything you’ve built for your own use, direct query access is very useful.
Memory/knowledge bases is an emerging category. mcp-kit (another server I built) handles storing and retrieving structured information — the kind of thing you’d otherwise maintain in a notes app or paste into each session. A tool like this makes Claude’s context persistent without needing to stuff everything into your CLAUDE.md.