Connecting AI Apps (MCP)

Mac only. This is an optional, more advanced feature — skip it if you don’t use AI assistant apps.

Epilog can let AI apps on your Mac — like Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor — read, search, and add to your journal on your behalf. So you can ask your assistant things like “summarize what I worked on this week” or “log that I spent an hour on the Acme proposal,” and it happens right in Epilog.

It works through MCP (Model Context Protocol), a standard way for AI apps to talk to other apps. Everything stays local: the connection only runs on your own Mac (127.0.0.1), only while Epilog is open and you’re signed in.

The MCP Server settings — the “Allow AI apps to connect” toggle, the running status, and (further down) the copy-paste setup snippets and agent limits.

Turning it on

Go to Settings → MCP Server.
Switch on Allow AI apps to connect. A status line confirms it’s running.
Under Connect Your AI App, copy the ready-made config snippet for your app (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor) and paste it where that app keeps its MCP settings.
Restart your AI app if it asks, and it’ll find Epilog.

Once connected, a small status button appears in Epilog’s toolbar showing whether the connection is live; click it to toggle the server.

What an assistant can do

Through Epilog, a connected app can:

Read & search your entries, and list your categories.
Add, edit, and delete entries.
Write summaries — for a day, a week, or a longer period (month, quarter, half-year, year, or a custom date range). An assistant’s writes never overwrite the summary Epilog’s own AI generated.
Restore a deleted entry — deletions stay recoverable for a while, so nothing is lost by accident.

Staying in control

Nothing works unless Epilog is running and you’re signed in — close Epilog and the door is closed.
Under Agent Limits you can cap how many deletions per session an assistant may make (10, 25, 100, or unlimited), so an over-eager assistant can’t clear out your log.

Back to the Epilog User Guide.