Agent setup

Use Showboat with your agent

Showboat's MCP server lets your coding agent work with your team's reviews from the session it builds in: read what the team marked on a deploy and fix it, check where a review or a vote stands, curate the release notes, and run your Workspace.

Quick setup

Add Showboat to your agent as a remote MCP server:

https://showboat.show/api/mcp

You sign in with your browser the first time you connect. There is no API key to copy.

What the Showboat MCP does

With it, your agent can:

Read your team's open Comments on a Show, each one pinned to the screen it's about, so it can fix them and push a new Take.
Check where a Show's review or a Sketch's vote stands.
See which differences on a Like-for-like comparison are still open.
Curate your Newsreel: edit, order and publish the Stories it proposed.
Administer your Workspace: invites, members, Teams, ingest keys and Projects.

The server speaks MCP over Streamable HTTP. Sign-in is OAuth with PKCE, as the MCP authorization spec describes. A client identifies itself with a client ID metadata document or registers automatically, so a client that supports remote MCP servers connects with nothing to configure.

Tools

Every tool, with what it does and what it needs, is in the tool reference. It is generated from the server itself, so it is always current.

Permissions

When you connect, Showboat asks which of three permissions to grant:

Permission	On the consent screen
`read`	Read your Projects, Shows, and Comments
`provision`	Create and revoke ingest keys
`admin`	Invite Members and Guests to the Workspace

admin covers Workspace administration and Newsreel curation. It always starts unticked, whatever your client asks for: tick it only if you need it. Actions only a Workspace Owner can take, such as removing a member or archiving a Project, also need the Owner role.

Each tool says whether it only reads or can change or remove something. Clients that honour this run read-only tools without asking, and ask you first before anything that removes, revokes, archives or unpublishes.

Set up your client

Claude (web and desktop)

Open Customize → Connectors, then choose + Add → Add custom connector.
Name it Showboat, paste the URL below, and click Continue.
If Claude asks how it should identify itself to Showboat, keep Use Claude's published identity.
Click Add, then connect and sign in to Showboat in the window that opens.

https://showboat.show/api/mcp

To use it in a conversation, turn it on under + → Connectors.

Claude Code

Add the server, then run /mcp in Claude Code and sign in:

claude mcp add --transport http showboat https://showboat.show/api/mcp

Any other MCP client

Add a remote MCP server with this URL. Choose Streamable HTTP (often just “HTTP”) if the client asks for a transport. The client opens Showboat's sign-in page itself.

https://showboat.show/api/mcp

Capturing: the other half

The MCP reads and runs your Workspace. Takes, the narrated walkthroughs your team reviews, come from your repository instead: after each deploy, a step in your pipeline captures the deployed feature and pushes a Take to Showboat with a per-Project ingest key. Your agent can mint that key with mint_ingest_key, and the server describes the push itself in its showboat://capture-contract resource. To set it all up, ask your agent to set up Showboat for your repository: it follows the setup playbook.

Security best practices

Connect only to the official endpoint, https://showboat.show/api/mcp.
Connecting gives your agent your own access to your Workspace, within the permissions you ticked. It never gets more than you have.
Leave admin unticked on the consent screen unless you need it. You can connect again with it later.
Keep confirmation on for tools that remove, revoke, archive or unpublish.
Watch for prompt injection: text from other tools or web pages in the same session can try to steer your agent into calling Showboat's tools. Read what it asks to do before you approve it.
Revoke ingest keys you no longer use, and disconnect agents you no longer use under Settings → Connections in Showboat.