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Making MCP cheaper via CLI

kanyilmaz.me

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Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#11

Post by thellimist »

crooked-v wrote: post #2

Cheaper, but is it more effective? I know I saw something about the Next.js devs experimenting with just dumping an entire index of doc files into AGENTS.md and it being used significantly more by Claude than any skills/tool call stuff.

personal experience, definitely yes. You can try it out with `gh` rather than `Github MCP`. You'll see the difference immediately (espicially more if you have many MCPs)

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#12

Post by thellimist »

dang wrote: post #8

The article's link to clihub.sh is broken. Looks like https://clihub.org/ is the correct link? I've added that to the toptext as well. Edit: took out because I think that was something different.

Good catch.

I didn't release the website yet. I'll remove the link

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#13

Post by econ »

I had deepseek explain MCP to me. Then I asked what was the point of persistent connections and it said it was pretty much hipster bullshit and that some url to post to is really enough for an llm to interact with things.

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#15

Post by groby_b »

speedgoose wrote: post #4

MCP has some schemas though. CLI is a bit of a mess. But MCP today isn’t ideal. I think we need to have some catalogs where the agents can fetch more information about MCP services instead of filling the context with not relevant noise.

You are free to build tools that emit/ingest json, and provide a json schema upon request.

The point is push vs pull.

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#16

Post by thellimist »

mijoharas wrote: post #5

This sounds similar to MCPorter[0], can anyone point out the differences? [0] https://github.com/steipete/mcporter

Main differences are

CLIHub

- written in go

- zero-dependency binaries

- cross-compilation built-in (works on all platforms)

- supports OAuth2 w/ PKCE, S2S, Google SA, API key, basic, bearer. Can be extended further

MCPorter

- TS

- huge dependency list

- runtime dependency on bun

- Auth supports OAuth + basic token

- Has many features like SDK, daemons (for certain MCPs), auto config discovery etc.

MCPorter is more complete tbh. Has many nice to have features for advanced use cases.

My use case is simple. Does it generate a CLI that works? Mainly oauth is the blocker since that logic needs to be custom implemented to the CLI.

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#18

Post by vasco »

A lot of providers already have native CLI tools with usually better auth support and longer sessions than MCP as well as more data in their training set on how to use those cli tools for many things. So why convert mcp->cli tool instead of using the existing cli tools in the first place? Using the atlassian MCP is dog shit for example, but using acli is great. Same for github, aws, etc.

Re: Making MCP cheaper via CLI

#20

Post by thellimist »

_pdp_ wrote: post #19

Hehe... nice one. I think we are all thinking the same thing. I've also launched https://mcpshim.dev ( https://github.com/mcpshim/mcpshim ). The unix way is the best way.

Nice!

Compared both

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TL;DR CLIHUB compiles MCP servers into portable, self-contained binaries — think of it like a compiler. Best for distribution, CI, and environments where you can't run a daemon.

mcpshim is a runtime bridge — think of it like a local proxy. Best for developers juggling many MCP servers locally, especially when paired with LLM agents that benefit from persistent connections and lightweight aliases.

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https://cdn.zappy.app/b908e63a442179801e406b01cf412433.png (table comparison)

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