ejholmes

Silly. All it needs is docs. No need to overcomplicate it.

Funny. Dealing with Kubernetes is my day job, and I can be equally critical of it. Pointing out absurdities is how we make things better, and that’s ok.

I always get a kick out of seeing MCP wrappers around CLI’s.

Great read. Thanks for sharing. 100% agree, `—json | jq` is where it’s at.

You're right, but it still doesn't mean MCP was a good design even in that space. We could've done better.

But they're not token efficient. Take the terraform example from the post. Plan JSON is massive. You're not saving tokens by using a Terraform MCP and shoving an entire plan into context. Composition allows for efficient token use.

> both are a method of tool calling, it does not matter which format the LLM uses for tool calling as long as it provides the same capabilities.

MCP tool calls aren't composable. Not the same capabilities. Big difference.

Thanks for reading! And yes, if anyone takes anything away from this, it's around composition of tools. The other arguments in the post are debatable, but not that one.

Author here! Biggest difference is composition. MCP tools don't chain (there's people trying to fix that, but it's still true right now).

I get it. This is coming from a place where I see MCP's being adopted, where CLI is (in my opinion) better. Particularly where you're already in a CLI environment, and tool composition is necessary. I'm sure there's plenty of folks that aren't operating in that environment.

Hi friends! Author here. This blew up a bit, so some words.

The article title and content is intentionally provocative. It’s just to get people thinking. My real views are probably a lot more balanced. I totally get there’s a space where MCP probably does actually make sense. Particularly in areas where CLI invocation would be challenging. I think we probably could have come up with something better than MCP to fill that space, but it’s still better than nothing.

Really all I want folks to take away from this is to think “hmm, maybe a CLI would actually be better for this particular use case”. If I were to point a finger at anything in particular, it would be Datadog and Slack who have chosen to build MCP’s instead of official CLI’s that agents can use. A CLI would be infinitely better (for me).

This will hopefully become obsolete in the near future. If you're on a recent MacBook (with TouchID), using the current version of Chrome, and using a website that supports the new WebAuthn standard (e.g. GitHub) then you get this for free; you can authenticate through TouchID.