Comment by ejholmes
8 hours ago
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).
Thank you for writing this. I've had similar thoughts myself and have been teetering back and forth between MCP and skills that invoke CLI. I'm hoping this creates a discussion that points to the right pattern.
"intentionally provocative"
I would almost use the words "intentionally uninformed" instead.
There are huge holes in the article (as pointed out by many comments here), and I have to wonder if you genuinely don't have enough experience with MCP to bring them up, or you intentionally omitted them to make the arguments for CLI.
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.