How to give Claude Desktop memory of your work with an MCP server

Claude Desktop is excellent, with one structural gap: every conversation starts from zero. It doesn't know what you did an hour ago, what's in your other chat, or what you're in the middle of building. You end up re-pasting the same context over and over.

The clean fix is to give Claude a toolit can call to read your current work, not a bigger paste, but live, structured memory it can query. That's exactly what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for, and it's what Khint exposes.

What "memory" actually means here

Khint's Memory is a work session: you start it before a task and it collects entries as you go, notes, the output of AI Actions you run, text you capture with OCR. It keeps a compact, rolling summary of that session in a local SQLite file on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded; the session lives on your device.

The MCP server makes that session readable by other AI tools. So instead of Claude Desktop guessing, it can ask: what is this person working on right now? What did they capture? What did the last action produce?

The five tools Claude gets

Khint ships a standalone MCP server (a small binary speaking JSON-RPC over stdio). Once connected, Claude Desktop sees these tools:

• list_sessions: enumerate your work sessions.
• get_session: read a specific session's entries.
• get_active_context: the compact summary of what you're working on now.
• search_session_entries: full-text search across what you've logged.
• add_session_entry: write a new entry back into the active session.

Connect it in four clicks (no JSON editing)

1. 1
   Start a work sessionIn Khint → Memory, start a session. As you run Actions and capture text, entries pile up.
2. 2
   Open the MCP page in KhintIt lists your AI tools. Find the Claude Desktop card under 'Use Khint in your AI tools'.
3. 3
   Toggle Claude Desktop onKhint writes its server into Claude Desktop's MCP config for you, no hand-editing the JSON.
4. 4
   Restart Claude DesktopReopen it so the new server loads. Ask Claude what you're working on and watch it call get_active_context.

Prefer to wire it by hand, or using Cursor or another MCP client? The same binary works anywhere that speaks MCP. The config entry looks like the usual server block:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "khint": {
      "command": "/path/to/khint-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Why a session beats a giant system prompt

You could paste your context into a long system prompt, but it goes stale the moment you do anything. A session is live: it reflects what you captured five minutes ago. And because the same session feeds Khint's own AI Actions, the context is shared. The rewrite you run in Khint and the question you ask Claude Desktop both see the same work.

That shared thread is the whole idea: capture once, and every AI tool you use draws from it. If you also want Khint to run prompts on selected text, see running your own prompts on a selection.