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Lightkone for Claude and other AI apps (MCP)

Lightkone runs a small MCP server next to the site, at /mcp/<token>. Connected to it, Claude (on claude.ai, the apps or Claude Code) can work with your library:

Tool What it does
search_papers Search titles, authors, abstracts, tags and notes, with the app's filters (tag:, author:, year:, has:pdf).
get_paper A paper's record, your notes, your highlights with their notes, and its BibTeX.
read_paper The paper's full text, page by page.
list_tags Tags and folders, and how many papers are in each.
search_full_text Find words inside the papers' text, with the page and a snippet. Narrow it with a search, like tag:qft.
get_citations The library papers a paper cites, and the ones that cite it, from the citation map.
find_missing_papers Works several of your papers cite that the library does not have.
list_branches Your kept Branches and their strongest candidates.
export_bibtex BibTeX for chosen papers or for everything a search finds.
add_paper Add a paper by DOI or arXiv id, with tags.
tag_papers Add or remove tags on several papers.
add_note Append to a paper's notes.

Apps that show MCP prompts (Claude Code lists them after /, claude.ai under the connector's menu) also get four ready-made asks:

Prompt What it asks
find_in_library What do I have on a topic, with my notes.
cite_draft Citations from my library for a paragraph, with \cite{} keys and BibTeX.
reading_gaps What my library keeps citing but lacks, and the best new candidates in my Branches.
explain_paper Walk me through a paper at research level, with my notes and how it connects.

The full text is extracted from the PDF the first time you open a paper in Lightkone's reader and saved as lightkone/text/<id>.txt next to it. search_full_text reads at most 40 texts per call, newest first; give it a search such as tag:qft or year:2018-2024 to search the right ones. The citation tools and Branches read what the citation map saved (lightkone/citations.json, lightkone/branches/), so open the map once in Lightkone first.

Your own address

Anyone using the site can connect their own library, as long as it lives in an S3/R2 bucket or a GitHub repository:

  1. In Lightkone, open Settings, set up your storage and save.
  2. Under Claude and other AI apps, press Make my AI app address. The site tries your storage once and gives you an address https://<site>/mcp/u1.….
  3. Add it as a connector (below).

The address carries your storage settings, encrypted with a key that only the server has. The site keeps no accounts and no copy of anyone's keys: each request decrypts the address and talks to your storage directly. Anyone who has the address can read and change your library, so keep it private. To cut an address off, replace the access key or token in your storage settings and make a new address.

A library kept only in the browser can't be reached this way.

On your own computer, with the CLI

Claude Code and Claude desktop can also start Lightkone themselves, with the command line: pip install lightkone, set the library up once with lightkone login, then

claude mcp add lightkone -- lightkone mcp

This needs no address and no secret on the site, works with a library in a plain folder too, and keeps your keys on your computer.

For whoever hosts the site

Personal addresses need one secret on the Pages project. In Cloudflare, open Workers & Pages → lightkone → Settings → Variables and Secrets → Add: type Secret, name MCP_SECRET, value a long random string (for example from openssl rand -hex 32), then redeploy. If MCP_SECRET is not set, the site uses MCP_TOKEN instead. Changing the secret turns off every address made with it, so set it once and leave it.

The host's own library, without the app's settings

The host can also serve one library straight from an R2 bucket bound to the project:

That library's address is https://<site>/mcp/<MCP_TOKEN>. Personal addresses work without either of these.

Connecting

A skill for Claude

Claude works better with the library when it knows the habits: search before answering, cite by key, check the text before claiming a paper says something, and ask before changing anything. Those are written down as a skill, served at /skills/lightkone/SKILL.md on the site (public/skills/lightkone/ in the repository).

Notes

Markdown · All docs as one text file · This page on GitHub