alt Hacker NewsWhen does MCP make sense vs CLI?
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This doesn't really pay attention to token costs. If I'm making a series of statically dependent calls I want to avoid blowing up the context with information on the intermediary states. Also, I don't really want to send my users skill.md files on how to do X,Y & Z.
And for anything at all complicated, what’s even better than a CLI is a JS or Python library so the thing can just write code.
This is actually the first use case where I agree with the poster. really interesting, especially for technical people using ai. why would you spend time setting up and installing an mcp server when u can give it one man page
I don't understand the CLI vs MCP. In cli's like Claude Code, MCPs give a lot of additional functionality, such as status polling that is hard to get right with raw documentation on what APIs to call.
I wonder if what we'll get out of MCP tech in the end is a standardised machine readable description of CLI interfaces? Could be neat actually.
Biggest downside of CLI for me is that it needs to run in a container. You're allowing the agent to run CLI tools, so you need to limit what it can do.
Couldn't agree more. Simple REST APIs often do the job as well. MCP felt like a vibe-coded fever dream from the start.
Thoughts on Agent Context Protocol (ACP)?
I don't know about this. I use AI, but I've never used or tried MCP. I've never had any problems with the current tools.
MCPs were dead in the water and were completely a bad standard to begin with. The hype around never made sense.
Not only it had lots of issues and security problems all over the place and it was designed to be complicated.
For example, Why does your password manager need an MCP server? [0]
But it still does not mean a CLI is any better for everything.
what honestly is the difference between an mcp and a skill + instructions + curl.
Really it seems to me the difference is that an mcp could be more token-efficient, but it isn't, because you dump every mcp's instructions all the time into your context.
Of course then again skills frequently doesn't get triggered.
just seems like coding agent bugs/choices and protocol design?
Lol people are so lost in the bs
First they came for our RAGs, now for our MCPs. What’s next ?
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This got renamed right in front of my eyes
I remember this kind of people against Kubernetes the same exact way. Very funny.
Hi friends! Author here. This blew up a bit, so some words.
The article title and content is intentionally provocative. It’s just to get people thinking. My real views are probably a lot more balanced. I totally get there’s a space where MCP probably does actually make sense. Particularly in areas where CLI invocation would be challenging. I think we probably could have come up with something better than MCP to fill that space, but it’s still better than nothing.
Really all I want folks to take away from this is to think “hmm, maybe a CLI would actually be better for this particular use case”. If I were to point a finger at anything in particular, it would be Datadog and Slack who have chosen to build MCP’s instead of official CLI’s that agents can use. A CLI would be infinitely better (for me).