Use PyPhi with an AI assistant

Two tools help an AI assistant with work on IIT, and they are meant to be used together:

• IIT Expert answers questions about the theory from its primary literature: the IIT wiki, the papers, and a glossary of the axioms, postulates and measures. It cites the paper, section or equation each claim comes from. It is hosted, so there is nothing to run locally.

• The PyPhi MCP server does the computing. It builds substrates, estimates what an analysis will cost, runs it, and plots the result. It runs locally, in the Python environment where PyPhi is installed.

IIT Expert is a work in progress. Its corpus and glossary are still being checked against the sources.

IIT Expert

IIT Expert has two parts. The connector gives the assistant the sources, and the skill tells it to read them before answering instead of relying on what it already believes about IIT. The plugin installs both.

Claude Code

claude plugin marketplace add wmayner/iit-expert-plugin
claude plugin install iit-expert@iit-expert

Codex

codex plugin marketplace add wmayner/iit-expert-plugin
codex plugin add iit-expert@iit-expert

Cursor

Open Customize → From GitHub Repository and enter wmayner/iit-expert-plugin.

claude.ai and Claude Desktop add the connector and the skill separately. The steps are at https://learniit.org/install, which is also where the instructions are kept up to date as IIT Expert changes.

If you set up the PyPhi server with pyphi-mcp install, it offers to run the Claude Code and Codex commands for you.

The PyPhi MCP server

In a uv project:

uv add "pyphi[mcp]"
uv run pyphi-mcp install

The PyPhi MCP server explains what install writes, how to connect other clients, and which tools the server provides.