alt Hacker NewsThink of MCP as a universal CLI tool for anything you can imagine running on a server (remote!). Even if you wanted to use a local CLI tool to call some remote server command, local CLI tools have different input/output formats, different commands/options, and those tools change over time. MCP doesn't change, it always tells the AI exactly how to call it, the calls always use the same format, it includes a standard, quite secure method of authentication, and it's all done in an AI-friendly way. And because of all of this, it uses less tokens, and has a much higher likelihood of success (e.g. AI tools failing to call CLI tools properly and looping trying to figure out the right arguments/input/output).
Now, if you don't care about authentication, don't care about wasted tokens, don't care about the AI screwing up CLI tool calls or needing to be trained on every one, and if you don't need to call something on a server, then MCP is useless to you.
In that case, you can use a skill calling an HTTP+JSON endpoint. Or if you mean it's literally a remote CLI, so it needs bidi streaming, that's what websockets is for (or gRPC but ehh). Those are well-established. MCP sounds like one of those "we need yet another a new standard, this time to rule them all" things.