[bmedwar]

Ingest pipeline, semantic embeddings across hundreds of thousands of records, cloud deployment on GCP and Neon — in about two weeks using Claude Code CLI. No IDE. Then I had to deliver it to a non-developer colleague who uses Claude Desktop on Windows. This essay covers the sharp edges of that transition: environment variables that don't propagate from dock-launched apps, PgBouncer silently dropping data during batch jobs, Windows path escaping in JSON config files, and the pragmatic reason MCP exists (it's the only mechanism by which Claude Desktop's Chat tab can call external tools — without it, there's no data access). Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the delivery process.