“Before you buy a hammer, ask yourself what you need to nail.”

Before you buy a hammer, ask yourself what you need to nail.

That's the question I keep coming back to every time someone asks me about AI agents: “What would I actually use it for?” Without a real answer to that, you're just buying a shiny hammer and looking for nails.

So here's a concrete example. You use QuickBooks for your accounting. Did you know QuickBooks has an MCP server?

What MCP actually is

A quick 411 on MCP, Model Context Protocol, a lightweight software bridge that gives AI assistants standardised, secure access to external tools and data. Think of it the way the official MCP documentation describes it: USB-C for AI. One standard plug, and any compliant AI client can connect. Before MCP existed, connecting an AI to QuickBooks meant a custom, one-off integration built from scratch every single time.

What the QuickBooks server does

The QuickBooks MCP server exposes your live books as callable tools. Intuit has published an official server on GitHub, and there are already community-built options with 50 or more tools covering customers, vendors, invoices, bills, and reports. In practical terms, that means you can ask an AI assistant “which invoices are outstanding?” or “what did I spend on software subscriptions last quarter?” and get a real answer pulled from your actual data, not a guess.

The actual use case

Now here's the use case: a bookkeeping assistant. Not a replacement for your bookkeeper, a tool that handles the repetitive question-answering and data-pulling so the human doing the books can focus on the work that actually needs judgement.

What to check before you connect it

To be fair, there are real things to check before you connect anything to your books. A good guide from Numeric puts it plainly: you're trusting whoever maintains that server with credentialed access to your financial data. Check who's maintaining it, what permission scopes it requests, how tokens are stored, and whether there's an audit trail. Start read-only. That's a sensible first boundary.

Intuit and Anthropic announced a multi-year partnership earlier in 2026, putting QuickBooks inside Claude via MCP. That's the clearest signal yet that this isn't a niche developer experiment, it's where the whole category is heading.

My current approach with any new tool is the same: nail the use case first, then wire it up. A bookkeeping assistant is one of the clearest use cases I've seen for MCP so far.

If you want help figuring out the actual use case before you wire anything up, that's exactly the kind of conversation worth having. Find me through the contact section of this site.