Comment by tymscar
5 hours ago
So basically the best way to use MCP is not to use it at all and just call the APIs directly or through a CLI. If those dont exist then wrapping the MCP into a CLI is the second best thing.
Makes you wonder whats the point of MCP
Then you inevitably have to leak your API secret to the LLM in order for it to successfully call the APIs.
MCP is a thin toolcall auth layer that has to be there so that ChatGPT and claude.ai can "connect to your Slack", etc.
This was my initial understanding but if you want ai agents to do complex multi step workflows I.e. making data pipelines they just do so much better with MCP.
After I got the MCP working my case the performance difference was dramatic
I have never had a problem using cli tools intead of mcp. If you add a little list of the available tools to the context it's nearly the same thing, though with added benefits of e.g. being able to chain multiple together in one tool call
Not doubting you just sharing my experience - was able to get dramatically better experience for multi step workflows that involve feedback from SQL compilers with MCP. Probably the right harness to get the same performance with the right tools around the API calls but was easier to stop fighting it for me
MCP is just JSON-RPC plus dynamic OAuth plus some lifecycle things.
It’s a convention.
That everyone follows.