I'm not sure I would prefer it to using Cursor. I was using Claude Desktop client to edit a bunch of (non-code) text files a couple of days ago, and a couple of times it crashed, and I had to restart it. When this happened, it lost some conversation history, although of course the files it had already edited were fine.
There are other approaches to having Claude edit files, but they're less suited for use with MCP (and hence they don't save cost like the OP does).
A) Aider gives very specific instructions about how Claude should describe patch operations: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/blob/dd4d2420df51dc29c2aed...
This works, but I don't know if anyone has tried using this technique in an MCP server. It seems like the way OP and the Filesystem MCP might be superior for small edits, but Aider's approach might be better for multiple edits in a single request-response. It should be possible to do this with an MCP server.
B) Anthropic provides fine-tuned models (text_editor_20250124 and text_editor_20241022) that know a specific text editing protocol: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/tool-us...
You could build a coding assistant like Aider on top of these, but obviously you're then tied to this implementation and it's harder to switch out models. And it wouldn't work with Claude Desktop.