When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
ejholmes.github.io
When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
1–10 of 301 posts
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#2Couldn't agree more. Simple REST APIs often do the job as well. MCP felt like a vibe-coded fever dream from the start.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#3I don't doubt that CLIs + skills are a good alternative to MCP in some contexts, but if you're building an app for non-developers and you need to let users connect it to arbitrary data sources there's really no sensible, safe path to using CLIs instead. MCP is going to be around for a long time, and we can expect it to get much better than it is today.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#4This doesn't really pay attention to token costs. If I'm making a series of statically dependent calls I want to avoid blowing up the context with information on the intermediary states. Also, I don't really want to send my users skill.md files on how to do X,Y & Z.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#5There's been an anti-MCP pro-CLI train going for a while since ~May of last year (I've been personally beating this drum since then) but I think MCP has a very real use case.
Specifically, MCP is a great unit of encapsulation. I have a secure agent framework (https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-core) where I convert MCPs to microservices via sidecar and plug them into a service mesh, it makes securing agent capabilities really easy by leveraging existing policy and management tools. Then agents can just curl everything in bash rather than needing CLIs for everything. CLIs are still slightly more token efficient but overall the simplicity and the power of the scheme is a huge win.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#6I don't doubt that CLIs + skills are a good alternative to MCP in some contexts , but if you're building an app for non-developers and you need to let users connect it to arbitrary data sources there's really no sensible, safe path to using CLIs instead. MCP is going to be around for a long time, and we can expect it to get much better than it is today.
Why? The llm can install cli through apt-get or equivalent and non developers wouldn’t need to know
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#7I remember this kind of people against Kubernetes the same exact way. Very funny.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#8This doesn't really pay attention to token costs. If I'm making a series of statically dependent calls I want to avoid blowing up the context with information on the intermediary states. Also, I don't really want to send my users skill.md files on how to do X,Y & Z.
the article only makes sense if you think that only developers use AI tools, and that the discovery / setup problem doesn't matter
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#9MCP has one thing going for it as an agentic API standard: token efficiency
The single-request-for-all-abilities model + JSON RPC is more token efficient than most alternatives. Less flexible in many ways, but given the current ReAct, etc. model of agentic AI, in which conversations grow geometrically with API responses, token efficiency is very important.
Re: When does MCP make sense vs CLI?
#10[dead]