Not having access to the shell is a big hindrance. I have my agent access Gitlab and Jira via CLI tools and in so many cases jq or python is used to manipulate or combine the data into a more useful format, making use of pipes and temporary files. You can of course limit what an agent can do, most easily by not giving it access to things it shouldn't do. I suppose there are no existing easy gateway methods to grant fine-grained OS-level permissions to add such things back, except perhaps `sudo` and similar tools.
MCPs are impossible to combine this way: everything you feed or get from them goes though the model and consumes tokens.
MCPs are impossible to combine this way: everything you feed or get from them goes though the model and consumes tokens.