Comment by vidarh

Did you test actually having command line tools that give you the same interface as the MCP's? Because that is what generally what people are recommending as the alternative. Not letting the agent grapple with <random tool> that is returning poorly structured data.

If you option is to have a "compileSQL" MCP tool, and a "compileSQL" CLI tool, that that both return the same data as JSON, the agent will know how to e.g. chain jq, head, grep to extract a subset from the latter in one step, but will need multiple steps with the MCP tool.

The effect compounds. E.g. let's say you have a "generateQuery" tool vs CLI. In the CLI case, you might get it piping the output from one through assorted operations and then straight into the other. I'm sure the agents will eventually support creating pipelines of MCP tools as well, but you can get those benefits today if you have the agents write CLI's instead of bothering with MCP servers.

I've for that matter had to replace MCP servers with scripts that Claude one-shot because the MCP servers lacked functionality... It's much more flexible.