Lightkone 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 how many papers carry each. |
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. |
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.
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:
- In Lightkone, open Settings, set up your storage and save.
- 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.…. - 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.
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:
- Variables and Secrets → Add: Secret
MCP_TOKEN, a long random token. - Bindings → Add → R2 bucket: variable name
LIBRARY, the library's bucket.
That library's address is https://<site>/mcp/<MCP_TOKEN>. Personal addresses
work without either of these.
Connecting
- claude.ai and the Claude apps: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste the address.
- Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http lightkone <address>
Notes
- Changes made through MCP appear in the app when you come back to its tab. Every save reads the library again first and merges what was saved elsewhere, paper by paper and field by field, so the app and an AI app don't overwrite each other. Only when both changed the same field of the same paper does the later save's value stay.
- GitHub-backed libraries commit each change through MCP, like the app does.