Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop connects to ThinkForge through MCP, giving Claude access to your project memory for searching, retrieving, and saving content — all running locally on your machine.

How it works

Claude Desktop uses stdio transport for MCP (rather than HTTP). ThinkForge provides a lightweight adapter that bridges between Claude's stdio protocol and the ThinkForge MCP server running on localhost:

Claude Desktop ↔ stdio ↔ adapter ↔ HTTP ↔ ThinkForge MCP (localhost) ↔ Project Memory

Once configured, Claude gains the same project memory tools available to other MCP clients — search, retrieve, save, tag, and cross-project queries.

What Claude can do

With the integration active, Claude Desktop can:

  • Search your project memory by meaning or keywords
  • Retrieve specific documents or content chunks
  • Save generated notes, summaries, or code back into your project memory
  • Search across all your ThinkForge projects
  • Find content by tags
  • List available projects and memory statistics

This means you can ask Claude questions grounded in your own research, notes, and documents without manually copying content into the conversation.

Setup

  1. Make sure ThinkForge Desktop is installed and running with a project open.
  2. Locate your Claude Desktop configuration file:
    • Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
    • Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
  3. Add a think-forge entry to the mcpServers section, pointing to the ThinkForge stdio adapter script.
  4. Restart Claude Desktop to load the new MCP configuration.
Setup scripts available. ThinkForge includes setup scripts that can configure Claude Desktop automatically. Check the MCP documentation folder in your ThinkForge installation for platform-specific instructions.

Requirements

  • ThinkForge Desktop running with a project open
  • Claude Desktop installed
  • Node.js available on your system (the adapter is a small JavaScript bridge)

Usage tips

  • Ask Claude to "search my project memory for..." to trigger a memory search
  • Ask Claude to save useful outputs with "save this to my project" to write artifacts into ThinkForge
  • Reference specific projects by name if you have multiple ThinkForge projects
Local only. The MCP connection runs entirely on your machine. Your project memory data is read by the local adapter and passed to Claude Desktop locally. The only external call is Claude's own API for generating responses.

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