Chain of Thought podcast archive MCP server

This read-only Model Context Protocol server lets AI agents and coding assistants search the transcripts and episode metadata of Chain of Thought, the podcast hosted by Conor Bronsdon, and cite its episode pages. It needs no login or API key. It runs as a Cloudflare Worker with D1 full-text search.

Endpoint

https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp is live. The transport is stateless Streamable HTTP. GET / describes the server and GET /health returns ok.

Tools

Tool	Inputs	Returns
search_transcripts	query (up to 200 characters), limit (1–20, default 8), optional episode (1–9999)	Ranked passages with episode, guests, speaker, timestamp, snippet, moment URL and citation.
search_episodes	query (up to 200 characters), limit (1–20, default 8)	Ranked episodes with date, guests, summary, matching chapters, URL and citation.
get_episode	episode (1–9999) or slug (up to 300 characters, including a full episode URL)	Metadata, guests, chapters and episode, YouTube and audio links.
get_transcript_excerpt	episode (1–9999), optional at (a segment_index from search results, a passage URL or its #t- anchor, m:ss or h:mm:ss), before (0–5, default 2), after (0–10, default 5)	Up to 16 consecutive segments with individual URLs, plus anchor and pagination flags.

How search ranks results

Transcript search uses BM25 over passages, with a boost for passages from episodes whose title, guests, chapter titles or summary match the query. Passages containing all query words come before passages containing some. Near-identical passages, such as sponsor reads repeated across episodes, collapse to one result.

A search_transcripts result has this shape (text values abbreviated):

{
  "episode": 77,
  "episode_title": "…",
  "guests": ["…"],
  "published_at": "…",
  "speaker": "…",
  "time": "…",
  "seconds": 29,
  "segment_index": 2,
  "snippet": "…",
  "match": "all_terms",
  "url": "https://chainofthought.show/podcast/…/#t-2",
  "episode_url": "https://chainofthought.show/podcast/…/",
  "cite": "Chain of Thought, chainofthought.show — https://chainofthought.show/podcast/…/#t-2"
}

Connect

These steps follow each vendor's docs as of 2026-10-14. The endpoint must be deployed before a client can connect.

Claude Code

Install in Claude Code

In a Claude Code session, add this repository as a plugin marketplace and install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add conorbronsdon/chain-of-thought-podcast-mcp
/plugin install chain-of-thought-podcast@chain-of-thought-podcast-mcp

The plugin connects to the public remote MCP endpoint without an API key. Its optional /chain-of-thought-podcast:cite-chain-of-thought skill helps find and cite podcast discussions.

Add the MCP server directly

Run the Claude Code MCP command:

claude mcp add --transport http chain-of-thought https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp

This uses local scope by default. --scope project writes .mcp.json; a project entry is:

{"mcpServers":{"chain-of-thought":{"type":"http","url":"https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp"}}}

--scope user makes it available across projects.

Claude apps custom connector

In Claude's connector settings, open Customize > Connectors > + Add > Add custom connector. Enter chain-of-thought and https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp, select Continue, choose No sign in under Authentication, then select Add. Free plans are limited to one custom connector. On Team plans only Owners and Primary Owners can add connectors; on Enterprise, Owners, Primary Owners and roles with Manage access to Libraries can.

Cursor

Add this to .cursor/mcp.json for a project or ~/.cursor/mcp.json globally, following the Cursor MCP docs:

{"mcpServers":{"chain-of-thought":{"url":"https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp"}}}

ChatGPT

Open ChatGPT plugins, select the plus button, then Add custom MCP server. Enter chain-of-thought and a description. Under Connection, enter https://mcp.chainofthought.show/mcp. Configure authentication (this server needs none), review the risk warning, select I understand and want to continue, then Create as a plugin and review the discovered tools. A public HTTPS endpoint is required; account and workspace policies apply. See the OpenAI connection guide.

Citing and usage terms

The source corpus states:

Attribution: "Chain of Thought — chainofthought.show"

Canonical: "Every record carries canonicalUrl. Cite that page, not this endpoint: it is the authoritative rendering and the one that gets corrected."

Transcripts: "Machine-generated (ASR), with entity corrections applied during sync. Transcripts may contain errors; verify quotations against the recording."

Redistribution: "This endpoint grants no additional licence to redistribute transcript text as a dataset or corpus. Link to and cite the episode page."

url is the page to cite; for a transcript passage it includes a #t- anchor to open that segment. The anchor may have one or two numbers and is separate from segment_index. Pass the full URL or its anchor to get_transcript_excerpt to retrieve that passage. episode_url is the episode page without a segment anchor. cite combines attribution and url in the format Chain of Thought, chainofthought.show — <url>.

Limits and freshness

Queries are limited to 200 characters. Search returns 1–20 results (default 8). Snippets are about 600 characters; excerpt segments are at most 1,500 characters, with at most 16 segments per excerpt. No tool returns a whole transcript. Some segments in early episodes 5, 6, 7 and 9 have no timestamp: time and seconds are null, while their URLs still work.

An hourly cron adds, changes or removes at most one episode per run, so a newly published episode is usually indexed within about an hour of appearing in corpus.json when there is no backlog. Successful tool results are cached for one hour; a repeated search can therefore return pre-ingest results for up to about another hour. Transcript corrections are picked up when the round-robin check reaches an episode; at one per hour, all 77 episodes take about 3.2 days. Logs record tool name, success, result count and duration. Query text is not logged.

Development

Use Node 22.18 or newer:

npm ci
npm test
npm run typecheck

For the three-episode fixture, run these in order, with dev:fixture kept running for the integration test:

npm run build-sql:fixture
npm run db:fixture
npm run dev:fixture
MCP_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp npm run test:integration

For the full corpus:

npm run build-sql
npm run db:full
npm run dev:full
npm run query -- --top 3 --compact search_transcripts '{"query":"..."}'
npm run eval

To test the cron locally, start wrangler dev --test-scheduled and call:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:8787/__scheduled?cron=23+*+*+*+*"

dist/ and .cache/ hold transcript text and are gitignored. Do not commit or publish them. See Deploying and the design notes.

License

The code in this repository is MIT licensed; see LICENSE. That license does not cover podcast transcripts, episode metadata or other content served by chainofthought.show, which this server reads at runtime. The usage terms above apply to that content.