alt Hacker Newsmcp's are barely needed, good cli's are usually better
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I find it depends a lot on the model used and what the MCP does. I have agents trawl research papers, and just giving the raw API to DeepSeek leads to lots of wasted tokens and bad use of the API options. Here, wrapping the API to minimize the available options and providing sane defaults fixes that. Perhaps a frontier model can use the API directly without issues, but for DeepSeek a good MCP wrapper is very useful. Besides that, having control and limits in the MCP is very useful for some ratelimited APIs
I agree. MCPs have the massive problem of not being composable, which is a big strength of shells/CLIs allow.
People make the argument that it doesn't matter for non-programmers. I use Bluebeam (a pdf editor which is standard in the construction industry) daily, and it has an MCP, but a big problem is that if the agent wants to import or export a large amount of data from a document, then it has to regurgitate a bunch of tokens into or out of the MCP. If it were a CLI, then it would just pipe things in and out as it needs.
I ended up just having the agent make a script that wraps the MCP so it can use it as a CLI instead.
It just removes the need to install a cli tool on your local machine. I in general are sceptical before I install some external 3rd party software. With MCP over HTTP transport, the MCP might still talk to your agent and tell the agent to do XYZ, but your agent can still treat that command as malicious and refuse to execute. While not perfect, it is just another layer of security.
It is the same with a wepapp: You could argue you don't neex browser apps if the user just install a software on their computer, but we feel better using the sandboxing environment of your browser.
Depending on use case, would start with just solid HTTP APIs, then a simple CLI to consume them, then add MCP using the new spec. Build slowly only adding new access protocols as needed.
Be surprised how far apps can get with just solid & well documented APIs. Modern agents are smart!
MCPs with oauth have a better security story
not this tired discusssion again
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For coding agents I agree with you, but people are building for more than just developers now. The idea that a user facing service would give their agents shell access is kind of horrifying, as you then make it possible for prompt injection to mean a system take over.
MCP has its place. It should not be the default for many use cases, but if you need to expose specific tools in a secure way to agents that are not trusted to run shell commands then MCP is great. Developers need to think beyond their own use cases and consider architecture patterns if they're going to build, not just consume, AI systems.