Claude Desktop

Use SpecForge tools inside Claude Desktop for project planning, specification review, and progress monitoring.

Claude Desktop supports MCP servers, giving you access to the full SpecForge toolkit directly in conversation. This is ideal for planning sessions, specification reviews, and monitoring implementation progress — all without leaving the desktop app.

When to Use Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop is best for work that involves thinking and reviewing, not writing code:

• Planning a specification — Describe what you want to build, let Claude help decompose it into epics and tickets, refine dependencies and acceptance criteria through conversation
• Reviewing a specification — Ask Claude to evaluate completeness, check for missing dependencies, identify tickets without acceptance criteria, flag structural issues
• Monitoring progress — Ask for a status update on your specification. Claude shows ticket counts by status, identifies blocked items, and highlights the critical path
• Exploring the dependency graph — “What tickets are blocked?” “What’s the critical path?” “Which epics can run in parallel?” — all answerable through MCP tools in conversation

ℹ️ Claude Desktop does not support Agent Teams. Agent Teams requires Claude Code’s ability to execute code, manage branches, and run tests on your local machine. Use Claude Desktop for planning and review; use Claude Code for implementation.

Setup

Add the SpecForge server to your Claude Desktop configuration file:

Add the SpecForge entry under mcpServers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "specforge": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@specforge/cli@latest"],
      "env": {
        "SPECFORGE_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop after saving. The SpecForge tools appear in the tool selector.

✅ Generate a dedicated API key for Claude Desktop in Settings > API Keys so you can revoke it independently from your CLI key.

Available Tools

All 22 SpecForge MCP tools work in Claude Desktop conversations. You can:

• Create and edit specifications, epics, and tickets
• Query the dependency graph and identify blockers
• Review implementation progress and session history
• Generate reports on specification completeness
• Search tickets by keyword or status

Workflow: Plan in Desktop, Implement in Code

A productive workflow uses both Claude Desktop and Claude Code:

1. Plan in Claude Desktop — Define your specification, create epics and tickets, link blueprints, validate the dependency graph, run Planning Review
2. Implement in Claude Code — Switch to your terminal, launch Claude Code, and let Agent Teams execute the plan

Both tools connect to the same SpecForge project. Changes made in Claude Desktop are immediately visible in Claude Code. The specification you refined in conversation is the same one the agents implement in the terminal.

This separation is natural — planning is deliberate, visual, conversational. Implementation is autonomous, terminal-based, code-focused. Different tools for different phases.

Next Steps

• Claude Code — Set up Claude Code for implementation
• Cursor & VS Code — Editor-based integration