Connect your agent

Pensieve for Claude Desktop

This page tells you how to connect Claude Desktop to Pensieve over MCP, and what changes on your computer.

Connect Claude Desktop

1. Install Pensieve (see Install).
2. Run one of these commands:

   pensieve integrate recommended   # every agent on this computer
   pensieve integrate claude-desktop-mcp pensieve-search   # only Claude Desktop

3. Restart Claude Desktop. It loads its MCP servers when it starts.
4. Ask Claude Desktop a question about your code, for example “where do we retry failed webhooks?”.

What Pensieve adds

Claude Desktop has no global instructions file that Pensieve writes to. Copy the instructions block into the rules of Claude Desktop. It tells the agent to call search before it greps.

Connect by hand

Add this entry to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json. Use the full path of your pensieve command. To find it, run which pensieve.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pensieve": {
      "command": "/Users/you/.local/bin/pensieve",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop does not start the server inside a repo. Thus the scope auto is everything that Pensieve indexes. To limit it, add "--scope", "payments" to args, with the name of a scope from Settings → Scopes.

The path above is the macOS path. pensieve integrate looks only there.

Remove

pensieve integrate claude-desktop-mcp --remove

Pensieve removes only the entries that it added.

See also: scopes, the MCP tools, and the benchmark.

Something wrong or missing? Tell us on GitHub.