On the morning of 2 October I opened the Claude Directory and saw Lemma Telepath in it.
An odd feeling.
Not because the directory is somehow sacred and everything has now worked out by itself.
Simply because three weeks ago there was almost no Lemma Telepath at all.
There was my Telegram.
There was a small MCP server.
And there was a fairly everyday task: to type something into ChatGPT along the lines of:
What did this person write to me on Telegram today?
and not have to go looking for the chat myself afterwards.
On 7 September I wrote the first entry about it.
Back then the project was named almost literally after what it was: telegram-business-mcp.
It could read messages, search conversations, handle photos, voice messages and files.
Then the same MCP connected to Claude.
That would have been a reasonable place to stop.
For a personal tool it was already a decent result.
I did not stop.
In three weeks far too much grew around a small MCP
When you build a tool for yourself, the architecture can be rather honest.
One user.
One Telegram.
One server.
If something is named oddly, the author remembers why.
If there is a non-obvious limitation of the Telegram API somewhere, the author knows about it.
If the authentication looks a little homemade, the author is the very person who has to authenticate.
The trouble starts the moment a second person appears.
Suddenly you need:
- separate users;
- tenant isolation;
- OAuth;
- scopes;
- a proper onboarding;
- a public domain;
- a privacy policy;
- terms;
- a way to delete data;
- a demo mode for review;
- comprehensible permissions;
- documentation that does not assume the reader has been living inside the repository for a month.
Somewhere along the way the project got the name Lemma Telepath.
And without my noticing, the question changed.
At first it was:
Can I give a model access to my Telegram?
Then:
Can I do the same for another person?
Then:
Can I make it so that another person actually understands what they are connecting?
Those are already three entirely different tasks.
On 30 September I wrote that there was no handsome ending yet
Two days ago I published the previous entry.
It was about the OpenAI review and a rather unexpected thing: what they reviewed first was not some particularly clever backend.
What they reviewed was how honestly the MCP describes its own tools.
The code said one thing.
The description sometimes promised a little more.
In places the annotation described the interaction with an external system less than precisely.
And that was when I first properly put it to myself that an MCP tool is not simply a function.
It is more like:
behavior + schema + description + permissions + annotations
If the function works correctly but the description lies, the tool is still described incorrectly.
At the end of that article I deliberately wrote that I did not yet know the result of the review.
Without a handsome:
We were accepted.
I wanted to leave the moment exactly as it was.
Submit pressed.
Remarks arriving.
What comes next unknown.
Two days later a handsome ending did turn up after all.
Just from the other side.
Anthropic approved Telepath
On 2 October Lemma Telepath passed Anthropic’s review and appeared in the Claude Directory.
It can now be found inside Claude’s connector catalogue and connected as an MCP service for Telegram Business.
For the user the idea has stayed almost the same as the one it all started with.
Connect Telegram.
Open Claude.
Type:
Find what we agreed on with this person.
And the model can genuinely go into the permitted Telegram conversations, find the thread, read the messages, look at the available attachments or transcribed voice messages, and come back with an answer.
Except that between that sentence and my server there is now one more layer.
A catalogue.
That is, a place where the project exists not because I handed somebody a URL along with instructions.
It can be discovered from outside.
For a small project that is quite an important boundary.
Being in the catalogue proves nothing
This is probably worth spelling out.
Getting into the Claude Directory does not mean having built a good business.
It does not mean having users.
It does not mean having proved product-market fit.
It does not mean Telepath is of any use to anyone but me.
Technical projects are rather easy to mistake for products at exactly this point.
You build something for a long time.
Then a handsome domain appears.
A logo.
OAuth.
Documentation.
A catalogue.
A product card.
And the brain is quite happy to fill in the missing part:
Well, now it is a product.
No.
Now it can be found as a product.
The difference is substantial.
Before publication the main question was:
Can we get from here to there at all?
Now the question becomes less comfortable:
And why would anyone want to go there?
And that part interests me more at the moment.
The project has acquired places where it exists without me
On 30 September I started a separate Telegram channel, Lemma Telepath.
A public Lemma account on X appeared alongside it.
These look like entirely non-engineering events.
A channel takes a minute to create.
Registering an account is quicker still.
But what matters to me here is the transition itself.
Until then the project’s history existed almost entirely inside the repository, my notes, and conversations with people I personally sent the link to.
Now it has public points of its own.
In Telegram I post small product updates.
First:
Lemma Telepath is published in the Claude Directory.
A few hours later:
Telegram Premium is no longer needed to connect Telepath.
On X the same changes already read not as my personal devlog but as messages from the product itself.
For example:
Lemma Telepath is now live in the Claude Directory.
And then:
Telegram Premium is no longer required for Lemma Telepath.
It sounds like a trifle.
But something rather interesting is happening here: the need to explain Telepath through me is gradually disappearing.
There is a site.
There is documentation.
There is the Claude Directory.
There is a Telegram channel.
There is X.
There is a bot.
Each acquires its own function.
The site explains the product.
The documentation explains how to connect.
The catalogue makes it discoverable.
The channel keeps the history of changes.
X carries those changes outward.
And the MCP does the work.
That, I suppose, is how a small technical project starts to grow a surface of its own.
Not when it acquires a logo.
But when a person no longer has to know the author in order to understand what this is, connect it and try it.
And in the evening one more barrier disappeared
The same day brought another small change, technically unrelated to the Claude review but possibly more important in product terms.
Telegram Premium is no longer required to connect the business bot itself.
Onboarding used to begin with an unpleasant caveat:
First you will need Premium.
To a developer that looks like one line in the documentation.
To a product it is an extra decision the user has to take before they have even tried your thing.
Pay Telegram.
Enable Business.
Find the right section.
Connect the bot.
Then go back to the AI client.
Then connect the MCP.
Every such step reduces the number of people who reach the moment:
Ah, so that is what it is for.
Now one of those steps is gone.
In Telegram it is enough to open Business → Chatbots and add @lemma_telepath_bot.
It seems like a trifle.
But I am beginning to suspect that a product consists, to an enormous degree, of exactly such trifles.
Not only of what the system can do.
But of how many doors stand between a person and that capability.
The most interesting part did not happen in the code
Judged by git diff, the last few weeks can be described rather dully.
OAuth.
Multitenancy.
Permissions.
Annotations.
Copy.
Demo login.
Various catalogues.
Documentation.
Some metadata fields.
Checks.
None of it on its own looks like the moment when:
Now the product has become real.
But step back a little and something else is visible.
At first the system depended on my head.
Then it stopped.
At first connecting depended on my personally sending a URL.
Now there is a point of discovery.
At first access rights existed because I knew the architecture.
Now they have to be expressed formally.
At first the tool descriptions were a hint.
Now they are a contract with the model.
At first Telegram was simply a source of my own data.
Now I have to think about other people’s data, deletion, isolation, permissions and the boundaries of access.
Each successive step removes the author from the system as a required component.
That, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting parts of productization.
Not adding more features.
But making the thing able to exist without the constant presence of the person who thought it up.
For now it is still a small project
Telepath has no large team.
No marketing department.
No handsome quarterly growth charts.
There is a server.
A Telegram bot.
An MCP.
A few catalogues.
A small site.
A channel.
X.
And a fair amount of code and odd technical decisions that had to be taken along the way.
OpenAI is still ahead.
Telepath is going through a separate review process there.
It may be accepted.
They may find something else.
After the previous experience I no longer treat a reviewer’s remark as an obstacle between me and the Published button.
Sometimes an outside review simply points at the place the author stopped noticing, because he has been looking at his own system for too long.
So let them look.
It makes for an amusing sequence
7 September:
I taught ChatGPT to read my Telegram.
30 September:
I submitted it to OpenAI and discovered that an MCP has to be able not only to work, but to explain its own boundaries to the model precisely.
2 October:
Another AI product put that MCP into its public catalogue.
Three weeks.
I do not know how far any of this will travel.
And for the first time, it seems, that does not particularly bother me.
Because the technical question it all started with has been answered.
Telegram connects to the model.
Now the harder part begins.
I need to find out whether anyone besides me can be connected to Telepath.
Telepath
- Site — telepath.lemma.company
- Connect — telepath.lemma.company/start
- Claude Directory — claude.ai/directory/lemma-telepath
- Telegram — @lemma_telepath
- X — @lemmacompany