alt Hacker NewsI still think MCP is completely unnecessary (and have from the start). The article correctly points out where CLI > MCP but stops short on 2 points:
1. Documenting the interface without MCP. This problem is best solved by the use of Skills which can contain instructions for both CLIs and APIs (or any other integration). Agents only load the relevant details when needed. This also makes it easy to customize the docs for the specific cases you are working with and build skills that use a subset of the tools.
2. Regarding all of the centralization benefits attributed to remote MCPs - you can get the same benefits with a traditional centralized proxy as well. MCP doesn't inherently grant you any of those benefits. If I use AWS sso via CLI, boom all of my permissions are tied to my account, benefit from central management, and have all the observability benefits.
In my mind, use Skills to document what to do and benefit from targeted progressive disclosure, and use CLIs and REST APIs for the actual interaction with services.
Replies
so now you have almost all the parts of an mcp:
1. the tools 2. the instructions
just add an auth mechanism to it and you get mcp OR use mcp because it's a nice self contained package that contains all of it.
See the three .gifs at the end of the post to see how clients use MCP prompts and resources and definitely check the specification for these two.