Discord app setup

You need a Discord application with a bot user. This takes two minutes and is free.

Create the application

1. Open the Discord Developer Portal and click New Application.
2. Give it a name — this is what people will @mention, so something like Claude works nicely.
3. On General Information, copy the Application ID. The setup wizard asks for it (it’s used to register slash commands and build the invite link).

Create the bot & token

1. Go to the Bot page.
2. Click Reset Token and copy the token. Treat it like a password — anyone with this token is your bot.

Enable the Message Content Intent

Still on the Bot page, under Privileged Gateway Intents:

• Toggle Message Content Intent → ON.

This step is not optional

Without this intent, Discord doesn’t deliver message text to the bot, and the connection fails with Used disallowed intents. It’s called “privileged” but requires no approval below 100 servers — which is exactly the self-hosted use case.

The other privileged intents (Presence, Server Members) are not needed.

Invite the bot

Use the invite link from the dashboard overview page — it requests exactly these permissions:

Permission	Why
View Channels, Read Message History	see your messages
Send Messages, Send Messages in Threads	answer
Create Public Threads	one thread per conversation
Embed Links, Attach Files	rich replies, response.md for long answers
Add Reactions	the 👀 / ✅ / ❌ lifecycle

You need Manage Server permission on the target server to invite it.