31–40 of 149 posts
10 years from now: "Can you believe they did anything with such a small context window?"
10 years from now: "The next big thing: HENG - Human Engineers! These make mistakes, but when they do, they can just learn from it and move on and never make it again! It's like magic! Almost as smart as GPT-63.3-Fast-Xtra-Ultra-Google23-v2-Mem-Quantum"
While I generally prefer CLI over MCP locally, this is bad outdated information. The major harnesses like Claude Code + Codex have had tool search for months now.
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!". Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills. The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security. When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many…
While I generally prefer CLI over MCP locally, this is bad outdated information. The major harnesses like Claude Code + Codex have had tool search for months now.
But tool search is solving the symptom, not the cause. You still pay the per-tool token cost for every tool the search returns. And you've added a search step (with its own latency and token cost) before every tool call.
With a CLI, the agent runs `--help` and gets 50-200 tokens of exactly what it needs. No search index, no ranking, no middleware. The binary is the registry.
Tool search makes MCP workable. CLIs make the search unnecessary.
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!". Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills. The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security. When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many…
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!". Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills. The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security. When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many…
I'm getting tired of everyone saying "MCP is dead, use CLIs!". Yes, MCP eats up context windows, but agents can also be smarter about how they load the MCP context in the first place, using similar strategy to skills. The problem with tossing it out entirely is that it leaves a lot more questions for handling security. When using skills, there's no implicit way to be able to apply policies in the sane way across many…
[1]: one might say 'of course you can just add details about the CLI to the prompt' ... which reinvents MCP in an ad hoc underspecified non-portable mode in your prompt.