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When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

ejholmes.github.io

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Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#81

Post by goodmodule »

I somehow agree with this but want to add my two cents here. Cloudflare's Codemode[0] is a great "replacement" for MCP because AI is trained for writing code and handling errors. But it also doesn't fix security and sandboxing. For CLI and file operations we have Vercel's just-bash[1] but for everything else there is no safe solution. Therefore MCP still makes sense until somebody sandboxes this part as well without needing to use Cloudflare or something.

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/agents/api-reference/codem... [1]: https://github.com/vercel-labs/just-bash

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#82

Post by leohart »

wenc wrote: post #74

MCPs (especially remote MCPs) are like a black box API -- you don't have to install anything, provision any resources, etc. You just call it and get an answer. There's a place for that, but an MCP is ultimately a blunt instrument. CLI tools on the other hand are like precision instruments. Yes, you have to install them locally once, but after that, they have access to your local environment and can discover things on…

I have also found this as well. CLI outputs text and input text in an interactive manner, exactly the way that is most conducive to text-based-text-trained LLM.

I do believe that as vision/multi-modal models get to a better state, we would see even crazier interaction surfaces.

RE: duckdb. I have a wonderful time with ChatGPT talking to duckdb but I have kept it to inmemory db only. Do you set up some system prompt that tell it to keep a duckdb database locally on disk in the current folder?

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#83

Post by umairnadeem123 »

> I tried to avoid writing this for a long time, but I'm convinced MCP provides no real-world benefit

IMO this is 100% correct and I'm glad someone finally said it. I run AI agents that control my entire dev workflow through shell commands and they are shockingly good at it. the agent figures out CLI flags it has never seen before just from --help output. meanwhile every MCP server i've used has been a flaky process that needs babysitting.

the composability argument is the one that should end this debate tbh. you can pipe CLI output through jq, grep it, redirect to files - try doing that with MCP. you can't. you're stuck with whatever the MCP server decided to return and if it's too verbose you're burning tokens for nothing.

> companies scrambled to ship MCP servers as proof they were "AI first"

FWIW this is the real story. MCP adoption is a marketing signal not a technical one. 242% growth in MCP servers means nothing if most of them are worse than the CLI that already existed

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#84

Post by ejholmes »

g947o wrote: post #79
ejholmes wrote: post #64

Hi friends! Author here. This blew up a bit, so some words. The article title and content is intentionally provocative. It’s just to get people thinking. My real views are probably a lot more balanced. I totally get there’s a space where MCP probably does actually make sense. Particularly in areas where CLI invocation would be challenging. I think we probably could have come up with something better than MCP to fill…

"intentionally provocative" I would almost use the words "intentionally uninformed" instead. There are huge holes in the article (as pointed out by many comments here), and I have to wonder if you genuinely don't have enough experience with MCP to bring them up, or you intentionally omitted them to make the arguments for CLI.

I get it. This is coming from a place where I see MCP's being adopted, where CLI is (in my opinion) better. Particularly where you're already in a CLI environment, and tool composition is necessary. I'm sure there's plenty of folks that aren't operating in that environment.

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#85

Post by ejholmes »

dnautics wrote: post #39

what honestly is the difference between an mcp and a skill + instructions + curl. Really it seems to me the difference is that an mcp could be more token-efficient, but it isn't, because you dump every mcp's instructions all the time into your context. Of course then again skills frequently doesn't get triggered. just seems like coding agent bugs/choices and protocol design?

Author here! Biggest difference is composition. MCP tools don't chain (there's people trying to fix that, but it's still true right now).

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#86

Post by ejholmes »

umairnadeem123 wrote: post #83

> I tried to avoid writing this for a long time, but I'm convinced MCP provides no real-world benefit IMO this is 100% correct and I'm glad someone finally said it. I run AI agents that control my entire dev workflow through shell commands and they are shockingly good at it. the agent figures out CLI flags it has never seen before just from --help output. meanwhile every MCP server i've used has been a flaky process…

Thanks for reading! And yes, if anyone takes anything away from this, it's around composition of tools. The other arguments in the post are debatable, but not that one.

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#89

Post by ejholmes »

bartek_gdn wrote: post #87

I've come to the same conclusion as op, created a CLI tool to work with Chrome sessions. It works well, and I'm planning to do some token comparison on this vs an MCP approach. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47207790

Neato! https://github.com/vercel-labs/agent-browser is a similar take here, and much better than the playwright MCP.
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