Setup tips & tricks — CMA as an MCP server Things that aren't obvious from the docs and tend to cost debugging time. --- Mental model Claude Desktop is the frontend, CMA is the backend The Claude you're typing to in Desktop is a relay . It calls with your words, calls to block until the CMA agent finishes, then shows you the reply. The actual work — tool use, code execution, repo edits — happens in the CMA session, not in Desktop. Eight 1:1 tools, one shim , , , , , , , are straight endpoint wrappers. is the only editorial: MCP is request/response and CMA completion is SSE, so something has t…