After Anthropic recently added modest Claude Code capability to their Pro plan, I’ve been testing it out. I’m still undecided on whether I like it better than Cursor or not.

I did run into one annoying thing, however, in the setup. It wasn’t very straightforward to set up MCP integration with Linear. This is important to me because it’s become a surprisingly important part of my workflow to just ask the LLM to see tickets. For some reason, the documentation on Linear’s side, on Anthropic’s side, and within Claude itself weren’t very helpful in figuring it out.

Trying to add Linear MCP using the normal syntax and the SSE syntax didn’t work. The approach of adding it to Claude desktop and importing it into Claude Code didn’t work iether.

What did work, however, was using the JSON syntax. So, without further ado, here is how you add the Linear MCP server to Claude Code in a way that will connect correctly (as of June 2025):

claude mcp add-json linear '{"command": "npx", "args": ["-y","mcp-remote","https://mcp.linear.app/sse"]}'