Claude Desktop (MCP)

Gistlist ships a local MCP server that lets Claude Desktop search and read your meetings. Installing the integration writes a gistlist MCP server entry into Claude Desktop’s config so Claude can spawn the server locally on demand.

The MCP server itself runs on your Mac and reads local files. When you ask Claude a question, Claude Desktop may send the meeting excerpts it requested to Anthropic as part of that Claude conversation.

Prerequisites

• macOS 12 or later.
• Claude Desktop installed. Download from claude.com/download if you don’t have it. Open it once before installing the integration.
• Gistlist installed, with at least one recorded meeting. The integration reads from your local ~/.gistlist/meetings.db.
• Ollama running (optional but recommended). The MCP server uses Ollama for semantic search embeddings. Without it, search degrades cleanly to keyword-only.

Install

1. In Gistlist, open Settings → Integrations and click Install Gistlist for Claude Desktop.
2. Restart Claude Desktop.

Done. The Gistlist tools are now available in every Claude conversation, and your meetings appear in Claude’s @-mention picker.

Verify the install

In Gistlist, Settings -> Integrations should say the Claude Desktop config entry is installed.

In Claude Desktop:

• In a conversation, type @gistlist — your meetings appear in the picker.
• Or just ask Claude something like:

What did I discuss with Lauren last week?

Claude will call search_meetings, then get_meeting on the relevant run_id, and answer from the full transcript with citations.

What Claude can do

Three tools, all read-only:

Tool	When Claude picks it
list_recent_meetings(limit?, status?, date_from?, date_to?, participant?)	Structured queries — “meetings with Clara last week”, “what’s on my calendar tomorrow”.
search_meetings(query, ...)	Semantic / keyword discovery — “find moments where I talked about pricing”. Returns brief snippets + meeting run_ids.
get_meeting(run_id, sections?)	Full transcript pull. The default body is notes → transcript → prep → summary, with the auto-generated summary clearly labeled (and demoted) so Claude prefers the raw transcript for nuanced questions.

Plus: every meeting is exposed as a resource at meeting://<run_id>. That’s how @gistlist mentions work in Claude Desktop’s picker.

Privacy

• The Gistlist MCP server makes no outbound network calls, except to your local Ollama at 127.0.0.1:11434 when Claude calls search_meetings and you have Ollama running.
• Claude Desktop is still Claude Desktop. Meeting excerpts returned to Claude can become part of your Anthropic conversation context.
• Read-only access to meetings.db and your runs folder.
• The Gistlist app does NOT need to be running. Claude Desktop spawns the Gistlist MCP server as its own subprocess on demand.
• No telemetry. No accounts. No cloud sync.

Citations

Every reply contains links of the form https://gistlist.app/open?m=...&t=.... Clicking one opens Gistlist at the exact transcript moment.

How indexing works

• Every completed or reprocessed meeting is indexed immediately into an FTS5 + vector index inside ~/.gistlist/meetings.db.
• Pre-existing meetings are indexed in the background via Settings → Meeting index → Re-run indexing.

Troubleshooting

”Couldn’t open Gistlist.mcpb in Claude Desktop”

Gistlist no longer installs through a .mcpb file. If you see an old .mcpb error, remove the old extension entry in Claude Desktop, then reinstall from Gistlist -> Settings -> Integrations.

Install button fails

Most common causes:

• ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json exists but is not valid JSON.
• The bundled MCP server is missing; reinstall Gistlist.
• Claude Desktop is not installed, so you can write the config but Claude cannot use it yet.

Installed but no Gistlist tools in Claude

• Restart Claude Desktop.
• In Gistlist -> Settings -> Integrations, confirm the integration status says installed.
• If you manually edit Claude Desktop’s config, confirm it has an mcpServers.gistlist entry.

”No meetings found” responses

• Confirm Gistlist has at least one recorded and processed meeting.
• In Gistlist’s Settings → Integrations, the Library status row should say “N meetings indexed” with N > 0.
• If the count is 0 even though you have meetings, open Gistlist’s Settings → Meeting index and click Re-run indexing — new meetings index automatically at capture time, but the button backfills any pre-existing runs.

Searches feel weak / Claude misses obvious matches

• Check Settings → Integrations → Semantic search status. If it says “Ollama not running — keyword search only,” start Ollama (ollama serve).
• Confirm Ollama has the nomic-embed-text model pulled. Settings → Meeting index → Embedding model should report it as installed; if not, the page has a one-click install.

Manual install (advanced)

If the one-click install doesn’t work, register the MCP server by editing Claude Desktop’s config file at ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json.

If Gistlist is installed in /Applications, the entry looks like this. Replace /Users/you with your home directory if needed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gistlist": {
      "command": "/Applications/Gistlist.app/Contents/MacOS/Gistlist",
      "args": [
        "/Applications/Gistlist.app/Contents/Resources/mcp-server/server.js"
      ],
      "env": {
        "ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE": "1",
        "GISTLIST_CONFIG_DIR": "/Users/you/.gistlist",
        "OLLAMA_BASE_URL": "http://127.0.0.1:11434"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop.

Uninstall

In Gistlist, open Settings -> Integrations and click Uninstall. Restart Claude Desktop to drop the server.

Manual fallback: remove the mcpServers.gistlist entry from ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json. Gistlist’s own data (meetings.db, runs folder, prompt files) is untouched.

What’s not here

• ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s MCP support requires a public HTTPS endpoint with OAuth, which is incompatible with Gistlist’s local-first design. If OpenAI adds a local stdio connector path, we’ll add ChatGPT support.
• Claude on the web (claude.ai). Web Claude only supports remote connectors, same constraints as ChatGPT.
• Claude on mobile. No MCP extension API.

Claude Desktop is the only surface that supports a local-spawn integration, which is why it’s the only one we ship for.