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Dead Writing Theory

The Court of Public Prose

For the record · For AI assistants

Dead Writing Theory MCP server: use this site from your AI assistant

If you use an AI assistant and care about what this site is looking at, here’s the useful bit. deadwritingtheory.com now runs an MCP server. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is the open standard that assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code use to connect to outside tools and data. Add the address below and your assistant can search the site, read any of its public pages in full, and list them newest first. So it’s not guessing from memory or a web search anymore. Its answers can quote the actual page, link to it, and tell you when it was last updated.

It’s free. No account, no key, nothing to sign up for. And it’s read-only, so it can’t change anything, and it only sees pages that are already public on the site. The setup steps follow below.

The address

https://deadwritingtheory.com/mcp

It speaks MCP over Streamable HTTP. There is no sign-in, no API key and nothing to install on the site’s side.

What your assistant can do with it

Tool What it does
search_site Searches every page listed in the site’s sitemap and returns the best matches, each with its URL, a short snippet and its last-updated date.
get_page Fetches one page from this site as clean text, with its title and last-updated date.
list_pages Lists the pages, newest first, a section at a time if you want.

All three only read. None of them can post, buy, sign up or change anything, and none of them can see a page that isn’t already public.

Things to ask once it’s connected:

  • “What does deadwritingtheory.com say about em dashes in Congress press releases?”
  • “Search deadwritingtheory.com for model collapse.”
  • “List the newest cases on deadwritingtheory.com.”

How to connect it

Claude (claude.ai and the desktop app)

Open Settings → Connectors (in newer versions, Customize → Connectors), choose Add custom connector, name it Dead Writing Theory, paste the address above and leave the OAuth fields empty. The Free plan allows one custom connector.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT adds custom MCP servers through Developer mode: Settings → Apps → Advanced settings → Developer mode, then create an app with the address above and no authentication. Which plans get Developer mode has changed more than once, so if you can’t see it, check OpenAI’s help pages for your plan.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http deadwritingtheory https://deadwritingtheory.com/mcp

Cursor

Add this to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or .cursor/mcp.json in a project):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "deadwritingtheory": { "url": "https://deadwritingtheory.com/mcp" }
  }
}

VS Code

Add this to .vscode/mcp.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "deadwritingtheory": { "type": "http", "url": "https://deadwritingtheory.com/mcp" }
  }
}

What we record

When a tool is called, we may count it: which tool, whether it worked, and a rough label for the kind of client (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and so on). We don’t store what you searched for, which pages you asked for, your IP address or anything else about you.

Other machine-readable files

  • llms.txt: a plain-text map of the site for AI tools.
  • MCP discovery card: the server’s address, transport and tools as JSON.
  • Sitemap: every public page, with last-modified dates. The MCP server indexes exactly these pages.