Comment by martinald

But this is just the nature of LLMs (so far). Every "conversation" involves sending the entire conversation history back.

The article misses imo the main benefit of CLIs vs _current_ MCP implementations [1], the fact that they can be chained together with some sort of scripting by the agent.

Imagine you want to sum the total of say 150 order IDs (and the API behind the scenes only allows one ID per API calls).

With MCP the agent would have to do 150 tool calls and explode your context.

With CLIs the agent can write a for loop in whatever scripting language it needs, parse out the order value and sum, _in one tool call_. This would be maybe 500 tokens total, probably 1% of trying to do it with MCP.

[1] There is actually no reason that MCP couldn't be composed like this, the AI harnesses could provide a code execution environment with the MCPs exposed somehow. But noone does it ATM AFIAK. Sort of a MCP to "method" shim in a sandbox.