Work items and pipelines are table stakes. Being able to search a wiki, read a page by path and write one back is what makes this useful for documentation work — capturing a decision where the team will find it, rather than in a ticket comment. One token covers all of it, so scope the PAT to what you actually intend the assistant to do.
An Azure DevOps server covering five areas with one personal access token: work items, boards, pipelines, pull requests and wikis. It also ships a command-line interface over the same operations for use outside an assistant.
- get_work_item, list_work_items using WIQL, search_work_items by text, and create_work_item and update_work_item for bugs, tasks and stories
- add_work_item_comment and get_work_item_comments, so the discussion is reachable too
- list_pull_requests, create_pull_request and update_pull_request
- list_pipelines and trigger_pipeline
- get_wikis, list_wiki_pages, get_wiki_page and search_wiki_page
- create_wiki, create_wiki_page and update_wiki_page — the wiki is writable, not just readable
- get_boards for the project's boards, and list_projects for the organisation
- A CLI over the same operations, for scripts and terminals
AZURE_DEVOPS_ORG, AZURE_DEVOPS_PROJECT and AZURE_DEVOPS_PAT. The token's scopes decide what works: code read and write for pull requests, work items read and write, build read and execute for pipelines, wiki read and write, and project and team read for boards. Node.js 20 LTS or newer. On Windows, use forward slashes and the full absolute path in the config — that is the usual reason it fails to start.
One command plus a key — npx -y @smithery/cli install @cakriwut/ado-mcp-server --client claude, then supply credentials