So far the initial impression is that the MCP is working very well. I’ve replaced the community version. It feels like the version in 4.3 is faster. I’ll test throughout the day and report back
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Thank you for the feedback!
It definitely should be as it’s not using AppleScript and supports also batch processing (but it’s up to the MCP client to take advantage of this).
Just did the same - WOW. I used the Claude connector with the new MCP, asked for a summary of 39 documents in a new group (buried two levels down) and got very impressive and accurate response. Fast, accurate and private. Thank you.
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Thanks to the DEVONthink team for this update — I’m sure it will unlock some really interesting use cases.
I already did an initial test with Claude on a group containing 500+ documents.
Overall, Claude was able to retrieve documents relatively quickly, but write operations seem to take noticeably longer. For example, the first “batch” of changes took around 5 minutes, so I assume larger-scale updates may take quite a while to complete.
the first “batch” took around 5 minutes. So I’d assume it will take me quite a while to do this change…
I also noticed what seems to be an issue with handling Markdown renames:
One additional piece of feedback: after Claude finishes updating documents in the group, the Date Modified field still appears unchanged. My expectation would be that modified documents would surface when sorting by Date Modified (now that Claude is done changing the documents), but that doesn’t seem to happen at the moment..
Thanks for the bug report, we’ll check this. Are your Markdown documents thumbnailed?
The performance is (almost) only limited by the MCP client, the used model & your subscription/tier etc. but not by our MCP server.
Only editing contents updates the modification date, changing metadata like the name doesn’t.
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I’m not entirely sure what does it mean thumbmnailed in this context…the files in question are regular Markdown files (.md) extension. However, in DT, they have “E-book” kind, I’m a bit surprised by that tbh: haven’t seen this kind type before in DT.
I also just encountered this error with some RTFs:
See menu Data > Thumbnails or Settings > Files > Preview.
Do you use custom metadata, especially rich text fields?
not until my test with Claude MCP. I have instructed it create a custom data filed “source” (hint: I had to do it manually, bc it can’t do that).
But it was able to populate the custom data field.
In my case, it’s single line text type.
Weird. The only way to reproduce it so far seems to be a rich text custom metadata field.
Do you have Calibre installed?
yes
As I suspected…
However, in DT, they have “E-book” kind, I’m a bit surprised by that tbh: haven’t seen this kind type before in DT.
This is not DEVONthink’s doing. Our app gets its information from the operating system. It doesn’t decide what a file type is. And Calibre is known to hijack the assocation for certain file types, including Markdown.
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so this markdown file, is actually something generated by Chat (within DEVONthink). in this particular case: it’s a summary of a recipe I generated. The file itself has a .md extension, but DEVONthink recognizes it as “E-book”:
This was one of the files Claude could not rename with MCP
That’s the kind returned by macOS and should be identical to the Finder. This depends on the installed apps, hence Jim’s question.
Anyway, MCP bug is fixed.
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to summarize: this MCP feature is very cool — tbh, I’m not sure I even would be using the built in Chat interface any longer: I just prefer interacting from within Claude.
but: it burns the usage super fast:
( I only asked to rename some files and tag them).
p.s. would be interesting to have some comparison what is more economical:
to do api calls from within Chat in DEVONthink OR use Claude MCP (for example, for documents tagging purposes…). but I’m not sure how to do this comparison in usage…
Free or paid account?
Claud Pro
How large are these documents?