Cookbooks

Each recipe takes one goal from nothing to a verified result: what you need, the steps, how to check it works, what to do when it does not, and where to go next. Each one opens with a prompt for your AI, because every recipe is also served as Markdown that an agent can follow.

Hand any recipe to your AI

Read https://moberghr.github.io/beacon/llms-cookbooks.txt, pick the recipe for: <your goal>,
tell me which one you picked, then follow it step by step and show me each "Check it works" result.
Ask me before every decision a recipe marks as one.

Or point the agent at one recipe: every page is at its URL plus .md, for example https://moberghr.github.io/beacon/cookbooks/connect-coding-agent.md.

Start here

If you want to	Recipe	Time
Let Claude act in your own application as your users, through your endpoints	MCP gateway for your application	about 1 hour, plus the Entra registration
Point Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code at a running Beacon	Connect a coding agent	about 10 minutes
Run Beacon inside your application, with its UI, monitoring and MCP server	Embed Beacon (PostgreSQL + Warp)	about 45 minutes
Get good answers from an agent connected to Beacon	Ask your data with an agent	about 15 minutes

Connect AI to your data

Recipe	You end up with	Time
Connect Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code	A coding agent calling Beacon’s MCP tools with a project-scoped API key kept out of your files	10 min
Add Beacon to claude.ai and Claude Desktop with Entra sign-in	A Claude custom connector whose users sign in with Microsoft Entra and reach their projects	45 min
Ask your data questions with an AI agent	An agent that orients, grounds, validates its SQL with dry_run, and rates answers	15 min
Publish an approved saved query as an MCP tool	A reviewed, parameterised q_<name> tool instead of free SQL	20 min
Give an AI agent access to one project only	An agent confined to one restricted project, with masking and caps, and its calls in the audit	20 min

Make your app AI-ready

Recipe	You end up with	Time
MCP gateway for your application	Your application as an MCP server: Entra sign-in, your endpoints as tools, your docs as grounding	1 h
Expose an endpoint as an MCP tool, safely, and test it	A self-service read tool and a confirmed write tool, with an end-to-end test	30 min
Ground AI answers in your own docs and data model	Your Markdown docs and EF Core model in the answers agents give	25 min

Embed Beacon

Recipe	You end up with	Time
Embed Beacon in an existing ASP.NET Core app (PostgreSQL + Warp)	Beacon’s UI at /beacon, its API and MCP server, on your sign-in and job runner	45 min
Embed Beacon on SQL Server with Hangfire	The same on SQL Server, with your own Hangfire scheduler	40 min
Sign in to Beacon with Microsoft Entra ID	Single sign-on for Beacon’s UI, with the first admin and a break-glass account	30 min

Monitor & govern

Recipe	You end up with	Time
Alert Slack or Teams when a nightly check fails	A scheduled check that posts to a channel and opens a task when it finds rows	20 min
Score a table with a data contract	A contract of quality rules, a score on a schedule, and an alert when it drops	20 min
Ship the MCP audit and security events to your SIEM	Every agent call and security event in your log pipeline, with traces and metrics	30 min

Prompts

The prompt library has ready-made prompts for coding agents in your repository, for asking your data questions through Beacon, for people using a gateway application’s tools, and for admins.

Missing a recipe?

Open an issue with the goal you had and what you tried. For anything not covered yet, llms-full.txt gives an agent the whole documentation in one file.