ComfyUI just shipped its official MCP — which means Claude (or Codex) can now build, run, and fix your ComfyUI workflows while you keep the creative half. I’m caveman-level at ComfyUI at best, and with an AI copilot doing the node engineering, I was generating images and video 100% locally on my own machine, for free. Full setup (it’s genuinely one sentence), when to run local vs. API nodes, and the easiest LoRA install you’ve ever seen.
We’ll cover what you need to get started (Claude Desktop or ChatGPT Desktop with Codex, plus the ComfyUI desktop app), what hardware actually matters, how to have Claude build an image-to-video workflow from scratch, how API nodes let you mix open-source models with closed platform models like Seedance 2.5 and Topaz in a single graph — and why the gap between open source and state-of-the-art is closing fast. As costs rise on the closed platforms, anything you can generate locally, you probably should.