IMO the biggest issue with CLIs for agents is to know when the agent is allowed to type. When is the command fully proceed, and next tokens can now be generated.
When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
141–150 of 301 posts
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#142> 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…
Fully agree. MCP servers were also created at a time where ai and llms were less developed and capable in many ways. It always seemed weird we'd want to post train on MCP servers when I'm sure we have a lot of data with using cli and shell commands to improve tool calling.
It’s telling the best MCP implementations are those which are a CLI to handle the auth flow then allow the agent to invoke it and return results to stdout.
But even those are not better for agent use than the human cli counterpart.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#143> 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…
I hate MCP servers
That said the core argument for MCP servers is providing an LLM a guard-railed API around some enterprise service. A gmail integration is a great example. Without MCP, you need a VM as scratch space, some way to refresh OAuth, and some way to prevent your LLM from doing insane things like deleting half of your emails. An MCP server built by trusted providers solves all of these problems.
But that's not what happened.
Developers and Anthropic got coked up about the whole thing and extended the concept to nuts and bolts. I always found the example servers useless and hilarious.[0] Unbelievably, they're still maintained.
[0]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#144> 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…
I avoid most MCPs. They tend to take more context than getting the LLM to script and ingest ouputs. Trying to use JIRA MCP was a mess, way better to have the LLM hit the API, figure out our custom schemas, then write a couple scripts to do exactly what I need to do. Now those scripts are reusable, way less context used. I don't know, to me it seems like the LLM cli tools are the current pinnacle. All the LLM companie…
I have had some positive experiences using the Jira and Confluence MCPs. However, I use a third-party MCP because my company has a data centre deployment of Jira and Confluence, which the official Atlassian MCP does not support.
My use case was for using it as an advanced search tool rather than for creating tickets or documentation. Considering how poor the Confluence search function is, the results from Confluence via an MCP-powered search are remarkably good. I was able to solve one or two obscure, company-specific issues purely by using the MCP search, and I'm convinced that finding these pages would have been almost impossible without it.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#145There 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 s…
This is my take as well.
Way easier to set up, centralized auth and telemetry.
Just use it for the right use cases.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#146> 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…
This was my gut from the beginning. If they can't do "fully observable" or "deterministic" (for what is probably a loose definition of that word) -- then, what's the point?
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#147YES, 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 t…
Great read. Thanks for sharing. 100% agree, `—json | jq` is where it’s at.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#148This is like comparing OpenAPI and strings (that may be JSON). That is, weird, and possibly even meaningless. MCP is formally defined in the general sense (including transport protocols), CLI is not. I mean, only specific CLIs can be defined, but a general CLI is only `(String, List String, Map Int Stream) -> PID` with no finer semantics attached (save for what the command name may imply), and transport is “whatever…
CLI tools are designed to provide complete documentation using —help. Given LLMs are capable of fully understanding the output then how is the MCP standardization any better than the CLI —help standardization?
Read only access control.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#149This 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.
It's the security layer that I'm most interested with MCPs. Granting full access to the CLI feels super dangerous and maybe there are options to certain commands that I want to restrict from LLM usage.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#150I wonder if what we'll get out of MCP tech in the end is a standardised machine readable description of CLI interfaces? Could be neat actually.