Intro to Claude AI:
Your Efficiency Assistant

Setting Up Claude With Skills and MCP Servers

Jeff Taylor

A development community focused on the .NET stack

953 members, free to attend, always

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Except for May, November and December

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Multiple Workshops on Friday

Saturday a Full day of sessions, no cost to attend

Run under Jax Data, our 501(c)(3)

https://dayofdata.org/jax

Sponsor

Tonight's sponsor

Jeff Taylor

Principal Data Consultant

Database Consulting, LLC

@ReviewMyDB

https://jefftaylor.io/blog

Jeff@JeffTaylor.io

Super Hero Suit

Poll

What is your role?

  • .NET developer
  • Other stack
  • DBA or data engineer
  • Something else entirely

Poll

Who's already using AI?

  • Every day
  • Tried it, gave up
  • Never touched it
  • Not allowed to at work

Intro to Claude AI:
Your Efficiency Assistant

Setting Up Claude With Skills and MCP Servers

Jeff Taylor

The Usual Workflow

How most of us use it

  • Open a tab
  • Paste a question
  • Copy the answer out
  • Fix what it got wrong
Tomorrow you start over.
It remembers nothing.

What It Doesn't Know

About you

  • Your voice - how you actually write
  • Your standards - naming, structure, conventions
  • Your tools - your database, your notes, your files
  • Your history - what you decided last week and why

The Fix

Three layers

  • Setup - point it at your work
  • Skills - write your standards down once
  • MCP - plug it into your actual tools

Agenda

  • Setup
  • Skills
  • MCP servers
  • Build something live
  • Gotchas

Setup

Where does it run?

  • Browser - claude.ai
  • Terminal - Claude Code
  • Desktop app - Cowork

Setup

Which one do I use?

SurfaceGood forWhat I use it for
BrowserAsking thingsQuick questions, research
TerminalFiles and codeScripts, decks, client work

Setup

Install

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

cd C:\ClaudeCo-Work
claude

DEMO TIME

Install, then point it at a folder.

One Folder

Where the work lives

CLAUDE.md

What it points at

# Jeff Taylor's working folder

Read these before doing anything on Jeff's behalf. They already exist. Never ask Jeff to re-explain his style or preferences, and never say you can't reach them.

- writing-style.md        voice and habits for anything written as Jeff. No em-dashes. Ever.
- presentation-style.md   slide decks and presentations.
- claude-preferences.md   file saving, platform limits.

CLAUDE.md

Standing rules

## Standing rules

- Save all final deliverables directly to C:\ClaudeCo-Work. The temp outputs path is too long for Jeff to open files from, so a file that only lands there is not delivered.

- If a target file is locked (open in Excel or Word, a ~$ lock file present), save a _v2 copy rather than failing.

- Jeff is premium on LinkedIn (3,000 chars) and X (25,000). Do not cap X posts at 280.
It's a text file.
That's the whole trick.

Skills

What is it?

A folder with a SKILL.md that says how you do a thing.

Skills

Why bother?

  • You explain it once
  • It applies every time
  • It syncs across every session
  • You can back it up and share it

writing-style.md

My voice, written down

16KB. Built from reading two dozen of my own blog posts.

presentation-style.md

How I build a deck

  • The cold open sequence
  • Fragment reveals, not transitions
  • Style at the theme level, one place to change it
  • The evaluation close
This deck
was built by the file.

My Own Skills

Nobody shipped these, I wrote them

  • presentation-theming - turn a brand into a slide theme
  • slides-com-deck-authoring - how my decks get built
  • web-development - how I want web code written
  • mobile-development - my MAUI conventions
  • writing-style.md and presentation-style.md - still just files

Skills I Didn't Write

Most of them, honestly

  • Some ship with it: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF
  • Some arrive as plugins, a whole bundle at a time
  • Slack, Canva, Zapier, Wix, Auth0, Postman
  • Role packs too: engineering, data, operations
  • I wrote four. I use a lot more than four.

Skills vs Files

Why the difference bites

  • A skill announces itself. It loads when the work matches.
  • A file sits there. Something has to go read it.
  • Both work. Only one is automatic.
  • If you keep repeating yourself, promote the file to a skill.

Re-skinning

One block per venue

--hashtag:  "#JaxDUG";
--brand:    #083552;
--brand-2:  #1A75BB;
--font:     Montserrat;

DEMO TIME

Write a blog post intro, in my voice.

Skills

How do I make one?

  • Write the markdown yourself, or
  • Ask it to build the skill with you
  • Drop it in your skills folder
  • It's there in every session from then on
  • Once you work through something, ask Claude to build and add a skill for what you just finished

Memory

It stopped starting over

  • It keeps notes on how I work, across every session
  • I corrected it once on how I fragment a slide
  • I have not had to say it a second time
  • The rules live with me, not with the tab
Tell it once.
That's the whole job.

MCP

What is it?

A standard way to plug a tool into the assistant.

MCP

Old way vs new way

  • Old - copy data out, paste it in, copy the answer back
  • New - it reads the source itself

MCP

What I have connected

  • SQL Server
  • Granola (my meeting notes)
  • slides.com (this deck)
  • Slack
  • Bitly
  • Postman

SQL Server MCP

What it can do

  • List databases
  • Read a table schema
  • List stored procedures
  • Run a query
  • Read a proc definition

DEMO TIME

Ask a live SQL Server a question in English.

SQL Server MCP

However, there is a catch:

  • It runs as whoever you connected as
  • Use a read only account for demos and exploring
  • It will happily run what you ask it to run
  • Never point it at production on a whim

Granola MCP

My meeting notes

"What did I commit to on that call?"

DEMO TIME

Pull commitments out of last week's meetings.

MCP

Setting one up

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mssql": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-mssql"],
      "env": { "MSSQL_CONNECTION_STRING": "CHANGE THIS" }
    }
  }
}

Trust, But Verify

A real one from this deck

  • The slides.com server takes a CSS field, and returns success
  • It never stores it. The field comes back empty every time
  • Nothing errored. It just quietly did not happen
  • So it drove my browser instead and clicked save itself

MCP

Keep in mind that...

  • Every server you add costs context
  • Turn off what you aren't using
  • Check what a server can actually do before you trust it
  • Read the permissions

Put It All Together

A real problem I had

"I need a countdown timer on the screen before my session starts."

The Constraint

PowerPoint can't count down

  • Option one: a VBA macro, blocked on a lot of machines
  • Option two: 452 slides, one per tick of the clock
  • It built both and didn't like either.

DEMO TIME

Build the timer page from scratch, live.

This Deck

One prompt, start to finish

  • Built the slides from my presentation rules
  • Skinned them in the JaxDUG palette, pulled from the logo
  • Pushed them to slides.com over MCP
  • Rendered every slide and checked its own work
  • Fixed what the render caught, before I ever saw it

What Came Out

Real output

Before and After

Does this make a difference?

TaskBeforeAfter
Blog post draft2 hours20 minutes
Deck re-skin for a venueAn eveningOne block

Recap

  • Point it at a folder
  • Write your rules down
  • Plug in one tool
  • Check its work
  • Start small

Resources

https://docs.claude.com

https://modelcontextprotocol.io

https://jefftaylor.io/blog

Tonight's slides and files: https://bit.ly/IntroToClaudeAI

Questions?

Thank you!

Jeff Taylor

Thank you for attending my session today.
If you have any additional questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.

@ReviewMyDB

https://jefftaylor.io/blog

Jeff@JeffTaylor.io