Not for every situation. CLI is great for coding agents (and I'd agree, far better in most cases than MCP). But it requires some execution runtime somewhere to actually run. So for app use cases where you don't want to build out your own tools for every integration, MCP can be a solid option.

MCP is great for docs and stuff, also saves tokens and reduces errors if you have something complicated you're abstracting over

- agents have old/inaccurate knowledge and it's nice to have up to date docs: https://awslabs.github.io/mcp/servers/aws-documentation-mcp-...

- geting agents to do apple builds and stuff is much easier with: https://github.com/getsentry/XcodeBuildMCP

- also for searching stuff like pdfs/epubs it's nice to have a place that's easy/fast for an agent to go to: https://github.com/nburns/doc-search-mcp

none of these strictly requrie mcp, but it is still a useful abstraction/shared convention

I've been sitting in the same camp recently. We maintain both an internal MCP and CLI for our app which our devs use locally. The CLI so far feels like a much smoother experience both in terms of setup, control and performance.

But i can see how MCP being able to plug into a remote agent that doesn't have terminal access is very useful. Seems like it's a best tool for the job conversation or am I missing some other advantage?

There is definitely some debate going on on mcp/cli/api etc, but is quite obvious that mcp is being adopted as standard for integrating third party applications to the major clients => chatgpt apps, claude connectors, mistral, cursor etc.. they all connect to external apps using mcp. Of course it's possible for you to tell claude to use some cli directly but it's much easier to connect the mcp with one click

CLI certainly is better than local MCP. But nowadays, most MCPs are remote and the comparison fall short, at the notable exception of `gh` in a coding environment. But having CLI already authenticated is not guaranted either!

Could you elaborate on this thought? MCP vs CLI feels very much like a Apples/Oranges comparison, without additional context.

I am so tired of people repeating this. Usually, this results from conflating two uses of MCP: local, which can indeed be replaced by CLI (and you can argue which one is better), and remote, which is entirely different, and there is no way to replace it with a CLI (note that you are making an implicit assumption that a CLI tool can be used at all, which is not always the case).

Please don't repeat this. It's like saying that apples are dead and oranges are the future.

cached thought. running CLIs is impractical and expensive in many environments and a hell of a lot less secure than using MCP

They serve two different purposes.

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