I've found MCP is great for stacking claude code instances- https://github.com/cduerr/stewardmcp has legit been a useful tool for me, and more reliable than handing a single instance 100k lines of code over a dozen repos.
When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
131–140 of 301 posts
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#132This feels misguided. MCP is still one of the best ways to execute deterministic sub-flows (i.e., stepwise processes) and secure tooling that an LLM would either lose itself while executing or should never access directly.
Im still struggling with understanding when MCP works better. I move everything to cli after a while. Can you give me more concrete examples? Because I don’t doubt you, I just don’t understand.
Most APIs and CLIs are not setup with clear separation of permissions, and when they have those permissions are mostly designed around human access patterns and risks, not LLM ones. The primary example of course being read-only vs write access.
MCPs have provided any easy way to side-step that baggage.
e.g. in an MCP, you have tools, those tools are usually binned into "read" vs "write". Given that, I can easily configure my tooling to give an LLM (e.g. Claude Code) unlimited read access to some system (by allowing all read-only tools) without likewise giving the LLM write/destructive access.
Obviously you can design APIs/CLIs with this in mind, but up until now that has not been a primary concern so they haven't.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#133I can't believe everyone is talking about MCP vs CLI and which is superior; both are a method of tool calling, it does not matter which format the LLM uses for tool calling as long as it provides the same capabilities. CLIs might be marginably better (LLMs might have been trained on common CLIs), but MCPs have their uses (complex auth, connecting users to data sources) and in my experience if you're using any of the…
Yeah, I've gotta use skills more. I didn't quite get it until this last week when I used a skill that I made. I didn't know the skill got pulled into context ONLY for the single command being ran with the skill, I thought the skill got pulled into context and stayed there once it was called.
That does seem very powerful now that I've had some time to think about it.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#134> 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…
Tools eat up so much context space, too. By contrast the shell tool is trained into Claude.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#135There is nothing wrong with MCP, it's just that stdio MCP was overengineered.
MCP's Streamable HTTP with OAuth discovery is the best way to ship AI integration with your product nowadays. CLIs require sandboxing, doesn't handle auth in a standard way and it doesn't integrate to ChatGPT or Claude.
Look at Sentry, they just ship a single URL https://mcp.sentry.dev/mcp and you don't need anything else. All agents that supports MCP lets you click a link to login to Sentry and they make calls to Sentry to fetch authentificated data.
The main problem with MCP is the implementation. Instead of using bash to call MCP, agents are designed to make single MCP tool calling which doesn't allow composability. We solve this problem with exposing MCP tools as HTTP endpoints and it works like charm.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the Tools model allows for finer grained security controls than just bash and pipe. Do you really want Claude doing `find | exec` instead of calling an API that’s designed to prevent damage?
It might be the wrong place to do security anyway since `bash` and other hard-to-control tools will be needed. Sandboxing is likely the only way out
not for every user or use case. when developing of course i run claude —-do-whatever-u-want; but in a production system or a shared agent use case, im giving the agent least privilege necessary. being able to spawn POSIX processes is not necessary to analyze OpenTelemetry metric anomalies.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#137To be fair to MCP it came out 150 years ago, in November 2024. Agents were running on steam and coal then with Sam Altman shovelling the furnace.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#138> 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…
How do you segregate the CLI interface the LLM sees versus a human? For example if you’d like the LLM to only have access to read but not write data. One obvious fix is to put this at the authz layer. But it can be ergonomic to use MCP in this case.
I’ve been testing with an ENV variable for a cli tool for LLMs that I’m making. Basically, I have a script that sets an ENV variable to launch the TUI that I want and that ENV variable changes the behavior for LLMs if they run it (changes the -h output, changes the default output format to json to make it easier to grep)
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#139I can't believe everyone is talking about MCP vs CLI and which is superior; both are a method of tool calling, it does not matter which format the LLM uses for tool calling as long as it provides the same capabilities. CLIs might be marginably better (LLMs might have been trained on common CLIs), but MCPs have their uses (complex auth, connecting users to data sources) and in my experience if you're using any of the…
Yeah, I've gotta use skills more. I didn't quite get it until this last week when I used a skill that I made. I didn't know the skill got pulled into context ONLY for the single command being ran with the skill, I thought the skill got pulled into context and stayed there once it was called. That does seem very powerful now that I've had some time to think about it.
Or you could argue that if the assistant needs so much modular context your tools are defective.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#140YES, I have been thinking the same and wrote a bit about it: https://vizzly.dev/blog/cli-json-output-llm-friendly/
Thank you so much to the GH CLI for making me realize this, really. The only MCPs I use still are ones that don’t have CLIs. Hell, I even just wrote a CLI for Bear Notes, for LLMs. It’s just better.
Seems like the last MCP use case is model to model communication but I’m sure others have approach’s for that?