How would the LLM exactly discover such unknown CLI commands?
Skills or tell it the --list command would be my guess.
Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
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Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#12MCP itself is a flawed standard to being with as I said before [0] and its wraps around an API from the start.
You might as well directly create a CLI tool that works with the AI agents which does an API call to the service anyway.
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#13mcp just need to add dynamic tools discovery and lazy load them, that would solve this token problem right?
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#14Why is the concept of "MCP" needed at all? Wouldn't a single tool - web access - be enough? Then you can prompt: Tell me the hottest day in Paris in the coming 7 days. You can find useful tools at www.weatherforadventurers.com/tools And then the tools url can simply return a list of urls in plain text like /tool/forecast?city=berlin&day=2026-03-09 (Returns highest temp and rain probability for the given day in the gi…
One thing that I currently find useful on MCPs is granular access control.
Not all services provide good token definition or access control, and often have API Key + CLI combo which can be quite dangerous in some cases.
With an MCP even these bad interfaces can be fixed up on my side.
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#15We had `curl`, HTTP and OpenAPI specs, but we created MCP.
Now we're wrapping MCP into CLIs...
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#16How is it different from 'mcporter', already included in eg. openclaw?
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#17Nice project! I've been working on something very similar here https://github.com/max-hq/max
It works by schematising the upstream and making data locally synchronised + a common query language, so the longer term goals are more about avoiding API limits / escaping the confines of the MCP query feature set - i.e. token savings on reading data itself (in many cases, savings can be upwards of thousands of times fewer tokens)
Looking forward to trying this out!
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#18Why is the concept of "MCP" needed at all? Wouldn't a single tool - web access - be enough? Then you can prompt: Tell me the hottest day in Paris in the coming 7 days. You can find useful tools at www.weatherforadventurers.com/tools And then the tools url can simply return a list of urls in plain text like /tool/forecast?city=berlin&day=2026-03-09 (Returns highest temp and rain probability for the given day in the gi…
The point is authorization. With full web access, your agent can reach anything and leak anything.
You could restrict where it can go with domain allowlists but that has insufficient granularity. The same URL can serve a legitimate request or exfiltrate data depending on what's in the headers or payload: see https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/claude-abusing-net...
So you need to restrict not only where the agent can reach, but what operations it can perform, with the host controlling credentials and parameters. That brings us to an MCP-like solution.
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#19How is this the 5th one of these I have seen this week, is everyone just trying to make the same thing?
Re: Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP
#20Why is the concept of "MCP" needed at all? Wouldn't a single tool - web access - be enough? Then you can prompt: Tell me the hottest day in Paris in the coming 7 days. You can find useful tools at www.weatherforadventurers.com/tools And then the tools url can simply return a list of urls in plain text like /tool/forecast?city=berlin&day=2026-03-09 (Returns highest temp and rain probability for the given day in the gi…
Proxying / gatekeeping