Agent Handler exposes its tools over MCP. Most agent runtimes - Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, ChatGPT - speak MCP natively, so connecting them is a matter of pasting a URL into a config file. If you’re building your own agent runtime, this page also covers the wire protocol.
You need three things, all from your dashboard.
Every MCP connection points at this URL pattern:
The URL identifies what tools (the Tool Pack) and whose credentials (the Registered User). The Access Key in the Authorization header authorizes the call. All three values are needed on every connection.
For the Context layer for employees setup, there’s a simplified URL that handles Tool Pack and user resolution through SSO instead.
Open Settings → Developer → Edit Config and paste:
Restart Claude Desktop. The first launch downloads mcp-remote (Node 20+ required).
Use the official MCP SDK when your agent is a custom runtime. Anthropic ships an SDK in both Python and TypeScript - both handle the JSON-RPC framing, session ID generation, and streaming response handling.
For custom transport behavior or a runtime that has no SDK, build directly against the wire protocol below.
MCP is JSON-RPC 2.0 over HTTP. Three core methods cover the agent surface.
The session ID rotates on Agent Handler’s side - read it back from the response header and use the new value for subsequent requests.
For streaming responses (large tool outputs), set Accept: text/event-stream and parse the response as Server-Sent Events. The SDKs handle this automatically; the raw clients above don’t.
Any header you send with an X- prefix is captured as metadata on the tool call and shown in the Tool Call Logs. Useful for tracing - set X-Chat-Id to your session ID and you can filter logs to one conversation. See Custom headers for MCP.
401 on every call. Double-check the Authorization header format (Bearer is required and case-sensitive) and that the API key matches the Registered User’s environment.For a full troubleshooting catalog, see Troubleshooting.
For command-line tool search and execution, use the Merge CLI.