build-mcp-app

build-mcp-app is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from anthropics/claude-plugins-official. It costs 111 tokens per session (4,747 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for building MCP apps: MCP servers that also display interactive forms, pickers, dashboards, or confirmation dialogs inside a chat.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design, implement, and test chat-based interfaces for MCP tools.
Why use it?
It explains how to add a user interface while keeping the server's standard tool and resource behavior.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex ✓ vendor

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Part of the mcp-server-dev plugin — 3 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to design, implement, and test chat-based interfaces for MCP tools.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app
About the project

Claude Code Plugins Directory is a marketplace containing plugins for Claude Code, including tools, commands, skills, agents, hooks, and model context servers. Claude Code users browse it to install Anthropic-maintained or approved third-party extensions.

anthropics/claude-plugins-official · 36,098 stars · on GitHub · code.claude.com

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add anthropics/claude-plugins-official --skill build-mcp-app
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mcp-server-dev, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for build-mcp-app

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for build-mcp-app

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/build-mcp-app.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 111 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,747 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 7 May 2026
  • Snyk warn 7 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00111 $0.04747
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.02374
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00949
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00475

Measured 7d ago against content hash d2fd94f00965, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

build-mcp-app scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

5 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/mcp-server-dev/skills/build-mcp-app/SKILL.md · 393 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 393 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Build an MCP App (Interactive UI Widgets)

An MCP app is a standard MCP server that also serves UI resources — interactive components rendered inline in the chat surface. Build once, runs in Claude and ChatGPT and any other host that implements the apps surface.

The UI layer is additive. Under the hood it's still tools, resources, and the same wire protocol. If you haven't built a plain MCP server before, the build-mcp-server skill covers the base layer. This skill adds widgets on top.

Testing in Claude: Add the server as a custom connector in claude.ai (via a Cloudflare tunnel for local dev) — this exercises the real iframe sandbox and hostContext. See https://claude.com/docs/connectors/building/testing.

Claude host specifics

_meta.ui.* key Where Effect
resourceUri tool Which ui:// resource the host renders for this tool's results.
visibility: ["app"] tool Hide a widget-only helper tool (e.g. geometry/image fetcher called via callServerTool) from Claude's tool list.
prefersBorder: false resource Drop the host's outer card border (mobile).
csp.{connectDomains, resourceDomains, baseUriDomains} resource Declare external origins; default is block-all. frameDomains is currently restricted in Claude.
  • hostContext.safeAreaInsets: {top, right, bottom, left} (px) — honor these for notches and the composer overlay.
  • Directory submission requires OAuth or authless (none) — static bearer is private-deploy only and blocks listing — plus tool annotations and 3–5 PNG screenshots; see references/directory-checklist.md.

When a widget beats plain text

Don't add UI for its own sake — most tools are fine returning text or JSON. Add a widget when one of these is true:

Signal Widget type
Tool needs structured input Claude can't reliably infer Form
User must pick from a list Claude can't rank (files, contacts, records) Picker / table
Destructive or billable action needs explicit confirmation Confirm dialog
Output is spatial or visual (charts, maps, diffs, previews) Display widget
Long-running job the user wants to watch Progress / live status

Read the full file on GitHub · 393 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 393 lines · 111 tokens per session scan A d2fd94f00965

Subscribe to this mod's changes

build-mcp-app is a skill published in the GitHub repository anthropics/claude-plugins-official (36,098 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 111 tokens to every session and 4,747 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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