When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

The difference is that the server gives a description of the api it understands in enough detail that the llm can make use of it.

MCP is still going to be handy enough for iot type devices, where an llm can discover what's actually supported by that device without needing to query about the specific version.

Swagger / OpenAPI just aren't detailed enough to use without other documentation.

Skills & instructions will always have the limit that they run locally, so if they don't match the server there is a problem.

Lol people are so lost in the bs

My success with LLMs has increased quite a bit since I stopped using MCP servers. I credit it to a couple things:

One, far less context usage Two, I replace it with better instructions to use the tools available.

The gist of it for me is that MCP is expensive and doesn't make up for better instructions using lighter weight tools.

Like the article mentions too, when you've got good tools available in the shell and good instructions for how to use them, the tokens required to do significant workloads is dramatically reduced specifically because the composability of tools in that environment is essentially unprecedented in computing.

In the rare case that Claude doesn't figure out good workflows on its own, you can just make a skill or add instructions to CLAUDE.md and the results are remarkably good

MCP is a completely useless abstraction, and I’m not sure why anyone would push for it over basic cli tools / skills.

The problem with CLIs is that unless it's a super well documented CLI like `gh`, the LLM will have a hard time figuring out how to use it from `--help` alone unless it's a really simple tool. If you want to do something complex, like create a JIRA issue, you either need to put the full issue schema in `--help` so that the LLM knows how to pass an issue or else you can use MCP which bakes tool schemas into the protocol.