tl;dr: "use cursor" to give up-to-date code documentation to your LLMs and AI code editors.
Context7 is an MCP. It's a little magic box that addresses a key limitation of AI models: their lack of updated information beyond their knowledge cutoff. With context7, you can now "fetch up-to-date, version-specific documentation and code examples directly into your prompts" and "enhance your coding experience by eliminating outdated information and hallucinated APIs".
Knowledge cutoff is an AI model's "graduation day," and without tools like web search or an MCP like context7, it doesn't know anything beyond that date.
After setting up the context7 MCP in your IDE (Cursor, for me), simply including "use context7" in the prompt to give the AI model access to up-to-date code documentation.
Context7 is a beginner-friendly MCP. It's no wonder that it's one of the most featured MCPs on smithery.ai, the MCP directory.
Pro tip: If you find yourself frequently using context7, you can even include it in your Cursor Rules. It will now "use context7" in all your prompts. There are two drawbacks to this approach, though. First, if you see unexpected behavior or responses from the AI models, it might not be obvious that context7 is influencing the output, and it can be relatively harder to trace that issue than with an inline prompt. Second, you'll be paying more money to the AI models for the increased number of tokens being processed for your prompts.
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