Connect an AI assistant

Before you start

Nobody has any access until the homestead’s owner turns it on for them — not even the owner, by default. On the homestead page, under “Assistant access,” the owner sets each person to one of three levels: no access, can look up records, or can look up and log records. That is a ceiling on what an assistant may ask for, not a connection by itself — each person still connects for themselves once their level allows it. Your role narrows it further: a viewer set to “look up and log records” still gets a read-only connection, because a viewer cannot write records at all, assistant or not.

Connecting an assistant is part of the Pro plan. On the free plan the level can still be set, but the assistant’s attempt to connect will fail — see Troubleshooting, below.

Your endpoint

Every assistant needs the same address:

https://farmsteadhelper.com/api/mcp

Connecting each assistant

Point a client at the endpoint above and it opens a browser tab for you to sign in to Farmstead Helper (if you are not already) and approve the connection on the screen described below. None of them need a separately-installed bridge or proxy.

Claude Desktop and Claude.ai

1. Open Settings — the hamburger menu in Desktop, or your profile icon on claude.ai — and choose “Connectors.”
2. Click “Add,” then “Add custom connector,” and paste in the endpoint.
3. Click “Add” again and follow the sign-in and approval prompts.

Once connected, the tools show up under “Add files, connectors, and more” in the message box.

ChatGPT

This one is gated, and not by us. ChatGPT only accepts a custom remote server in Developer Mode, available solely on an Enterprise or Edu workspace and switched on by a workspace administrator under Workspace Settings → Permissions & Roles — OpenAI’s restriction, the same for every server. Once it’s on: add a custom connector, paste in the endpoint, and approve when prompted.

Cursor

1. Add a server entry pointing at the endpoint, either from Cursor’s MCP settings or by editing ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or .cursor/mcp.json in a project) directly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "farmstead-helper": {
      "url": "https://farmsteadhelper.com/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Cursor opens the sign-in and approval tab itself the first time it uses the server. Expect the approval screen to show Cursor’s name as “not verified,” unlike the other three clients — that’s a gap in Cursor, which cannot yet prove its own name to a server, not a problem with this connection. See “What ‘Verified’ means,” below.

VS Code (Copilot Chat)

1. Open the Command Palette and run “MCP: Add Server.”
2. Choose an HTTP server and paste in the endpoint.
3. Sign in and approve when the browser tab opens.

VS Code adds an entry to mcp.json (per workspace, or in your user settings). Field names shift as the feature evolves, so if you are editing by hand rather than using the command, follow VS Code’s own MCP documentation for the current shape.

What the approval screen shows

Whichever client you use, it lands on Farmstead Helper’s own approval screen — the last moment you can notice an assistant is about to be handed your records before it happens. It names three things above the checkboxes: the assistant asking, which homestead, and at what level.

Below that is a checkbox for each thing being asked for, all checked by default, in two groups: “What it can see” and “What it can change.” Uncheck anything you do not want to grant right now — a narrower grant here holds, the same way a narrower access level does. If the assistant asked for something your access level does not allow at all, that is named separately and is never offered as a checkbox, because there is nothing to grant of it.

The second group only appears if your level is “can look up and log records” and your role allows writing. Leaving every box in it unchecked is how you connect an assistant read-only for now without anybody changing your access level — it gets a connection that can look things up and is shown no tool that could change anything. A viewer never sees that group at all, whatever level the owner set.

What “Verified” means

Anybody can register a client and call it “Claude Desktop.” Verified means this server fetched a document published at the domain shown, and that document named itself — the name is backed by control of that domain, not just typed in at registration. Unverified does not mean the connection is dangerous; it means nobody has vouched for the name, the way Cursor’s currently does not. If you did not just start this connection yourself, close the page and leave everything unchecked — a familiar name proves nothing on its own.

The same distinction decides what you see later on Connected assistants. An assistant is shown with its product’s own mark there only when its name is verified against the domain beside it; everything else shares one plain mark. We never display a logo an assistant supplied about itself, for the reason above — a logo is as easy to claim as a name, and it is the thing you would read fastest.

What your assistant can and cannot do

Exactly two access levels exist beyond “no access,” and there is no finer-grained per-tool control beyond what you uncheck on the approval screen.

Read only

An assistant connected at this level can:

• See your flocks, plantings, beds, and seed vault
• See your history of feedings, harvests, deaths, and purchases
• See your sales, your farmstands, goods and price list, and each stand’s honor-box counts with what went missing
• See your equipment: each machine’s service history, what it has cost you, and which maintenance reminders are due
• Run saved views and ask open-ended questions about your records
• See your homestead overview and season settings
• Read your notebook: the notes shared with the homestead, and the ones you keep to yourself, because the assistant reads as you, and export it as a spreadsheet
• See the names and metadata of photos attached to your records — not the photos themselves; images stay out of reach of any assistant today
• Export your history, the records themselves (every flock, bird, planting, bed, piece of equipment, farmstand, good and purchase you have, active or archived), and how a shared purchase was split, the same rows a spreadsheet export would give you, capped at 2,000 rows per call and limited to 5 export calls per person per homestead per hour, so one runaway conversation cannot pull your whole ledger over and over

It cannot change anything. Every tool that would is simply absent from the list an assistant sees at this level.

Read and write

Everything above, plus the ability to record work, the same actions available from the app itself:

• Start a flock, log a feeding, an egg collection, a batch of deaths, a cull, or birds you gave away
• Add a bird, record its status, its sale, its death or that you gave it away, or archive it
• Record a sale of eggs, birds, meat, produce or goods, at one of your farmstands or anywhere else
• Add or rename a farmstand, or a goods item you make or resell, such as bread or jam
• Record a stand day: what was taken from the honor box and what came in, split across the items to the cent and priced from your price list, which it can also update or remove a price from. It matches items to the flocks, plantings and goods you already have, and never makes one up to fit
• Start a planting, record a transplant, something applied to it like compost or fertilizer, or a harvest
• Record a seed purchase, mark a seed lot depleted, or add, retire or bring back a crop or variety of your own
• Recount a seed packet: say how many seeds are actually left after counting them, which puts a mistyped purchase or sowing right without voiding either entry
• Create or rename a bed, plan what goes in it before you sow, place or clear a planting on it, fill it in, or set the homestead’s frost dates
• Record a purchase, allocate its cost across more than one flock or bed, or take one share of that split back off what it was charged to
• Add a machine, log a service on it like an oil change or a new chain, and add a maintenance reminder or turn one off
• Record what a machine cost and when it arrived, on a machine that has neither on record — typically putting the right price back after a mistyped one was struck
• Save or delete a saved chart
• Write, edit, archive or restore a note in your notebook
• Correct a mistake the same way you would from the app: void an event, or archive a record and restore it later
• Fix the name or the notes on a flock, bird, planting, seed packet, machine, purchase or variety of your own, or a bird’s leg band, sex or hatch date. Nothing counted changes this way: a wrong number is voided and recorded again, except on a seed packet, which cannot be voided that way and is put right with a recount instead

It cannot permanently delete any of your records. It can remove four things outright: a saved chart, a price, where a planting sits on a bed, and one share of a split purchase (the purchase stays, and that share goes back to not yet split). Each of those can simply be made again if that turns out to be a mistake. Removing a photo deletes the file for good, so that stays in the app, where you do it yourself.

What no level ever allows

A short list, and every item on it is a deliberate line:

• Inviting anyone, changing a role, or any other membership change. An assistant cannot widen who can see your homestead’s records, only work with the records themselves.
• Changing your email address or password
• Anything to do with billing — starting, changing, or canceling a subscription
• Deleting your account, or a homestead
• Bulk-importing a spreadsheet of records

None of these show up as a checkbox to uncheck, because none of them are ever offered to an assistant in the first place. Membership is the one worth a sentence of why: every other write can be corrected the same way it was made — voided, archived, restored. Adding somebody is different, because a person who has been added has already been able to read, and possibly export, everything; removing them afterward does not undo that. Who can see this stays a decision a person makes, not one an assistant carries out.

Granting and revoking access

There are two separate controls, and they cut off different things.

The owner sets the ceiling, from the homestead page’s “Assistant access” section — raising, lowering, or turning off any person’s level at any time, including their own. This is the stronger of the two: changing a level, in either direction, revokes every assistant connection that person currently holds at once, because every request an assistant makes re-checks the current level from scratch. Even a credential already issued and not yet expired is refused the moment it is next used. Whoever it affects has to reconnect and approve again, at whatever the new level now allows.

Each person can also see and cut off their own connections, one at a time, from Connected assistants on the account page — the one you’ll actually use day to day. Disconnecting stops that assistant getting a new credential, but does not reach one it already has: that credential is a signed token Farmstead Helper keeps no copy of, the same reason a physical key cannot be recalled once handed over. It keeps working for up to 5 minutes, until it expires on its own — the connections page says as much next to the list.

For no lingering window at all, change the access level (even to the same one) — that always closes the gap immediately. Disconnecting a single connection is the lighter, everyday tool for “I am done with this one for now.”

Troubleshooting

“No assistant access here”

You will see this if you try to approve a connection before the homestead’s owner has turned assistant access on for you at all, or while your level resolves to nothing an assistant could use. Ask the owner to set your level on the homestead page, under “Assistant access,” then try connecting again.

The connection fails with a message about a plan

Connecting an assistant is part of the Pro plan. On the free plan, an assistant that gets past the approval screen still fails to connect, with a message naming the plan rather than anything about the assistant itself.

Something that worked yesterday stopped working

The most common reason is that somebody — you, or the owner — changed the access level since the assistant last connected. See “Granting and revoking access,” above: any change to a level ends the existing connection on purpose, and the assistant needs to be reconnected and re-approved at whatever the level now allows.

Anything this page does not answer belongs on the help page. What an assistant sends and to whom is also covered in the privacy policy.