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When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

ejholmes.github.io

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Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#281

Post by jeremyjh »

goranmoomin wrote: post #72
jeremyjh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really matters because of the impact it has on context tokens. Reading on GH issue with MCP burns 54k tokens just to load the spec. If you use several MCPs it adds up really fast.

The impact on context tokens would be more of a 'you're holding it wrong' problem, no? The GH MCP burning tokens is an issue on the GH MCP server, not the protocol itself. (I would say that since the gh CLI would be strongly represented in the training dataset, it would be more beneficial to just use the CLI in this case though.) I do think that we should adopt Amp's MCPs-on-skills model that I've mentioned in my ori…

MCP specs are verbose json objects and they have to go into the context before you can call them. So yes it is an issue with the fundamental design of the protocol.

Even if the model doesn’t already know the cli commands it can interrogate them at a much lower token cost for just the commands needed.

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#282

Post by closeparen »

D-Machine wrote: post #238
seemaze wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dump a large payload into Claude's filesystem and let him figure it out I just realized I never thought of Claude as ‘him’, usually I think of Claude as ‘it’..

Because "him" is objectively wrong, under almost any interpretation of any words involved. You can cause Claude, or any text-based LLM, to emit language that matches almost any personality / gender / character in the training set. At best you might be able to say "the default outputs have a masculine tone / vibe", but this still doesn't justify, by modern discourse, the "him".

The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#287

Post by D-Machine »

vrosas wrote: post #256
D-Machine wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "him" is objectively wrong, under almost any interpretation of any words involved. You can cause Claude, or any text-based LLM, to emit language that matches almost any personality / gender / character in the training set. At best you might be able to say "the default outputs have a masculine tone / vibe", but this still doesn't justify, by modern discourse, the "him".

You took the time to write this entire paragraph and didn’t realize it’s just because Claude is a masculine name?

The use of "him" by GP is extremely unusual IMO, and I suspect is odd for anyone with English as their native language. The current convention among normal people seems to me to be to avoid pronouns other than "it" with these tools, and generally just use the name. The name is not really relevant: like, sure, in some contexts we think of ships as "she/her", and may prefer feminine names for them, but if you used e.g. "she" rather than "it" to refer to the Titanic or any other ship with a female name, this is going to cause some double-takes / disfluent comprehension in the vast majority of native speakers in most cases.

Only if you imagine e.g. some stereotypical pirate with an eyepatch slapping the hull and saying something like "Aye, but she weathered the storm, as she always does" might this feel normal. Or, maybe if you are a Redditor and trying to make it your AI boyfriend / girlfriend, you can use he/him or some other neo-pronoun, but this is currently abnormal and not the general context.

And the fact that you can make the model act as any gender again shows why choosing "him" as some default here is strange. Absent any specific context, the choice of "him" here is poorly justified.

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#288

Post by D-Machine »

closeparen wrote: post #282
D-Machine wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "him" is objectively wrong, under almost any interpretation of any words involved. You can cause Claude, or any text-based LLM, to emit language that matches almost any personality / gender / character in the training set. At best you might be able to say "the default outputs have a masculine tone / vibe", but this still doesn't justify, by modern discourse, the "him".

The GPTs are "it" because they were deliberately named in a way to discourage anthropomorphizing them. Anthropic does want you to anthropomorphize Claude, and they gave their model a male name. It's not that deep!

And we should IMO resist Anthropic wanting us to anthropomorphize it, because Claude is not a person with a gender!

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#289

Post by mamaluigie »

Is it just me or is hackernews being flooded with overhyped AI "Discoveries". Only thing that changes is what data is being trained on it or the interface. I come here for interesting computer science/systems related content.

I get it, the entire economy is being invested into LLMs right now... Lots of AI Salesmen these days pissing me the fuck off.

Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?

#290

Post by itake »

tartieret wrote: post #205

It seems that the author thinks that AI use is limited to developers, I don't understand how short slighted is the debate between CLI and MCP. Sure, CLI are more convenient, but currently most AI users consume LLM through online tools like ChatGPT A basic example: a company using ChatGPT or Claude, and wanting to connect their business tools (ex: marketing, sales, project management...). in that case MCP is perfect f…

MCP isn't good for enterprise.

Skills + CLI let companies describe exactly how the tool should be used (for example, JIRA MCP just exposes functions, JIRA skill can say, "I'm in the finance team, my project space is FIN-, if you create a ticket, use that." and then expose the same jira cli.

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