EdStem MCP

An MCP server that lets you ask Claude any question and have it pull the answer from your Ed Discussion (edstem.org) posts. It searches Ed's live API, reranks the hits with Cohere Rerank 3.5 for relevance, and hands the most relevant threads to Claude, which reads them and writes a cited answer.

How it works

you ask Claude  ─▶  list_courses ─▶ search_ed (Ed keyword search ─▶ Cohere rerank)
                                          │
                                          ▼
                                    get_ed_thread (full thread, markdown)
                                          │
                                          ▼
                              Claude synthesizes a cited answer

Cohere is used only as a second-stage reranker — not for embeddings or answer generation. If COHERE_API_KEY is unset, search still works using Ed's native ordering.

Tools

Tool	What it does
list_courses()	List your Ed courses and their course_ids.
search_ed(course_id, query, limit=20)	Keyword search + Cohere rerank; returns thread summaries with relevance scores.
get_ed_thread(thread_id)	Full thread (question + answers + comments) as markdown.
recent_ed_threads(course_id, limit=20)	Most recent threads in a course.

There's also an answer_from_ed prompt that scripts the search→read→cite flow.

Setup

1. Get your keys

• Ed API token: https://edstem.org/us/settings/api-tokens
• Cohere API key (optional but recommended): https://dashboard.cohere.com/api-keys

2. Install

With uv (recommended):

uv sync

Or with pip:

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

3. Configure credentials

Copy .env.example to .env and fill it in:

cp .env.example .env

ED_API_TOKEN=your-ed-token
COHERE_API_KEY=your-cohere-key
# EU users: ED_API_BASE=https://eu.edstem.org/api/

Connect to Claude Code

Pass the credentials inline (no .env needed):

claude mcp add edstem \
  -e ED_API_TOKEN=your-ed-token \
  -e COHERE_API_KEY=your-cohere-key \
  -- uv run edstem-mcp

If you installed with pip into a venv, replace uv run edstem-mcp with the path to the installed edstem-mcp executable (e.g. .venv/bin/edstem-mcp).

Then just ask, e.g. "What did the staff say about the HW3 deadline on Ed?"

Develop / debug

Exercise the tools in the MCP inspector:

uv run mcp dev src/edstem_mcp/server.py

Notes

• The Ed API is unofficial and in beta; endpoints may change.
• Keep .env out of version control (already in .gitignore).