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Set Up Trello MCP in Cursor To Chat With Your Project Boards

  • Writer: Harshal
    Harshal
  • Mar 1
  • 3 min read

Cursor, Community MCP, And Trello = AI chat-first UX for project management

AI chat is now foundational UX for interacting with any product. I wanted the same chat-first experience for Trello, so I set up Cursor with Trello MCP. Here are a few build notes.

This takes 2 minutes to read.

project management mouse pain vs trello AI agent
project management mouse pain vs trello AI agent

Related:

AI Chat As Foundational UX

Here are common ways I use AI chat:

  • Ask questions on support websites

  • Analyze or edit meeting recordings

  • Create or summarize engineering tickets, like Jira

  • Search the web, like Perplexity

  • Edit photos, videos, and audio

  • Learn a new product, like building n8n or Zapier automations

  • Analyze and visualize data, like PostHog, Hex, or Metabase

  • Edit documents, like Notion or Google Drive

Problem Context

I use multiple boards in Trello:

  • With my wife, for house tasks like paperwork and smart home fixes (our "Family Firm" board)

  • With freelancers, for data analysis, programming, or automations

  • With a personal assistant (a freelancer), for data entry and web research tasks

Trello's mouse-heavy interface and lack of bulk actions (on the free plan) make it hard to use when inspiration strikes or I have many ideas. AI chat is now foundational UX. When established tools like Zoho or Trello lack a chat interface, the gap feels real.

Solution

Teresa Torres spoke about Trello MCP on the How I AI podcast, so I reproduced it.

Here's what I got:

Using Trello MCP Using Cursor
Using Trello MCP Using Cursor

Approaches Considered for Trello MCP

For Cursor or Claude Code users:

For n8n or Zapier users:

Alternatives:

  • Point Lovable, Bolt, or v0 to the Trello API documentation or the community MCP GitHub. These coding agents can create a chat interface. Or use OpenWebUI.

Impact

Within 10 minutes of setting up the MCP, I tagged and assigned every ticket in two boards. The setup added fun to project management. Next, I started thinking about habits I can change to work chat-first with Trello.

Trello MCP output
Trello MCP output

Learnings

  • Test and iterate on your setup. For example, Cursor often misbehaves with MCPs. It works the first day, then it works worse later.

  • Watch tool count. For example, Zoho MCP had 200+ tools, and that seemed to overload the model's context window.

  • You can allowlist most read actions in the MCP by default, but rarely allowlist the delete options.

  • The MCP client has information about the Trello board, but it needs information from other sources to derive more value. For example: If it knows my conversations with my assistant, it can do a better job triaging tasks on my assistant board. If it knows bugs my automations face, it can do a better job creating bug tickets or adding information to my automations board.

Future Improvements

  • Build an MCP integration with n8n to trigger it from Telegram on my phone

  • Add more context so the agent can have opinions on board tasks

Related:


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