The MCP connector
The MCP connector
Point your own AI client at your manuscript. It can read every word and tend your canon — and it can never write a sentence of your prose. That last part is enforced, not promised.
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is the standard way an AI client reaches into an outside service and uses it as a set of tools. Calliope speaks it. Connect a client like Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor, and it works against your real book — the same canon the web app holds — instead of a copy you pasted into a chat window.
What a connected client can do
A connected client authenticates as you and gets, by tier:
- Read anything — your outline, any chapter’s full text, a search across the manuscript, your whole Map of characters and facts, and your marginalia. Ask your agent what you established five chapters ago and it can go and check.
- Run Calliope’s AI — entity detection, consistency checks, synopsis generation — grounded in your canon.
- Tend your canon (with a subscription) — write marginalia, manage structure, and edit the Map.
The full, generated list is in the tool reference.
The one thing it can never do
A connected client can never write or edit your chapter prose. There is no prose-write tool, and no scope that could grant one — not turned off, but never built. An MCP client is, by definition, an AI; letting it write the body would make Calliope “an AI that writes your book,” which is exactly the product we refuse to be.
This is the augmentation promise made unbreakable. Everywhere else in Calliope, “the app never writes your prose” is a principle. Here it’s a property of the wire — the refusal holds even for the robots. As it’s stated in the app:
The author’s hand stays on the page: there is no tool — and never will be — that writes or edits the prose of a chapter.
If you want to script changes to your own prose with your own code — an import/export round-trip, a deterministic find-and-replace — that’s a different surface with a different guarantee: the Writer API, which is your own programmatic hand, not an agent between you and the page.
What it costs
The model is simple, and it’s the same one the Writer API uses:
- Reading is free. Connecting a client and reading your whole book costs nothing — no credits, no subscription.
- Calliope’s AI tools spend credits, metered in euros on the same balance as the web app. No subscription needed.
- Writing back into your canon needs a subscription. Without one, a connected client is read-only (and can still run the AI tools on credits).
The reasoning behind that shape is in Tools & tiers.
Get started
- Connect your client — Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor, plus the one-time consent.
- Tools & tiers — what your agent can do, and what each tier costs.
- Tool reference — every tool, generated from Calliope’s live definitions.
- Unlocking writes — subscribe so your agent can write back.
- Revoking access — cut a client off whenever you want.