Are you team MCP or team CLI?

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Team CLI. I generally think we should build tools that are usable by humans and agents alike. An anti-pattern is having to use an agent to do something because you didn't build a human-accessible one. Another anti-pattern are MCP (Model Context Protocol) interfaces that are not managing any context.

That said, MCP could be an effective way to sandbox what an agent can do with a tool. Also, it seems plausible to me that a tool that actually provided information to a model via the MCP protocol could be more useful than a CLI tool which operates in the "silence means success" mode of most unix CLI tools.

Basically, make a design choice for _reasons_ and not just because you like that TLA of the option you picked.

To me it depends on the intended use:

- MCP - if you need discoverability. a great example for this is something like context7

- CLI/API + Skill: When you have a defined workflow you want to use. For me a good example of this is using the Linear GraphQL API instead of their MCP

I prefer the Linear API because, where I work, we have come up with our way of using the tool so I don't need the entire MCP to do what I need the agent to do. I think for most use cases an MCP is a waste of context.

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