The Right Way to Start Claude Code on an AWS Project

You know the drill for adding an MCP server to a project: dig the exact command string out of the docs, hand-write a .mcp.json with an absolute path you'll typo once, restart the editor, and discover no tools showed up because the server expected a config file you haven't created yet. Plenty of MCP servers lose their would-be users somewhere inside that loop. Infrawise collapses the whole loop into one command. It's an open-source tool ( npm ) that statically analyzes your codebase, AWS infrastructure, and database schemas, then exposes that context to AI coding assistants over MCP — so Claude Code knows your actual partition keys, GSIs, and indexes instead of guessing from source files. This post is about the part that usually kills tools like this before they deliver any value: setup. Section 1: One command, four steps npm install -g infrawise # or skip install and use npx cd your-project infrawise start --claude start does four things, in order: 1. Probes your environment. If there's no infrawise.yaml in the project, it generates one. It reads AWS_PROFILE if set; otherwise it looks at your configured AWS profiles — one profile means zero questions, several means one prompt asking which to use. That's the entire interview. (If you want the full guided wizard instead, infrawise start --interactive runs it.) 2. Runs the analysis. It scans your AWS services, database schemas, and codebase, builds a graph of services, tables, indexes, and query patterns, and runs rule-based analyzers over it. No LLM is involved in this step — extraction and analysis are deterministic, so the same infrastructure always produces the same graph. 3. Writes .mcp.json to your project root. This is the file you'd otherwise write by hand: { "mcpServers" : { "infrawise" : { "command" : "infrawise" , "args" : [ "serve" , "--stdio" , "--config" , "/absolute/path/to/infrawise.yaml" ] } } } 4. Opens Claude Code. Claude Code reads .mcp.json automatically and starts the session with all 21 infrawise