Get the free MCP Field Manual (the 6 survivors + install commands)
Every AI listicle tells you to install the same 15 MCP servers — written by people who never ran one. I installed all 15 on one machine and gave each a real task: pass and it stays, fail, hang, or hit a paywall and it gets uninstalled. Nine were gone by the end of the day, including two that PASSED their tests but lost to redundancy. This manual is everything that survived. THE 6 KEEPERS with the exact claude mcp add command for each, copy-paste ready: Context7 (live, current docs for any library — kills hallucinated APIs; quoted the real Remotion docs in 30 seconds, free, no key), Exa Search (agent-grade web search whose hosted endpoint answered with NO key in 17 seconds), the official GitHub MCP (live repo data, PRs, issues, first try, via GitHub's own remote endpoint), Microsoft's Playwright MCP (the browser automation workhorse, 29s test), Google's Chrome DevTools MCP (the debugger — console eyes, network trace, 22s test), and n8n-MCP (plain English to real n8n automations from a bundled local node database — the non-coder unlock). THE FULL ELIMINATION TABLE for all 15: why Firecrawl's key wall ('your IP address looks suspicious'), Magic MCP's double 4-minute hang and February-dead repo, Notion's zero-tools-until-OAuth (use Claude's native connector instead), Figma's token brick, Serena's crash on a real messy repo, GitMCP and Desktop Commander passing but losing to redundancy, Perplexity's paid key, and Blender's addon babysitting each got the axe. THE 3 SECURITY RULES from the April 2026 OX Security advisory (CVE-2026-30623, command injection in the MCP stdio transport, ~150M downloads affected) in plain English — never paste a config from a random gist, read the command field, prefer vendor-maintained servers. Plus the 5-QUESTION TEST so you can put next month's fifty new 'must-install' servers on trial yourself.
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