Comment by hkbuilds

I've been building tools that use both approaches and the answer really depends on the context.

MCP shines when you need stateful, multi-step interactions - things like browsing a codebase, running tests iteratively, or managing deployment pipelines where each step depends on the last.

CLI wins when the task is well-defined and atomic. "Run this audit", "deploy this thing", "format this file." No ambiguity, no state to maintain.

The trap I see people falling into: using MCP for everything because it's new and shiny, when a simple CLI wrapper would be faster, more reliable, and easier to debug. The best tools I've built combine both - CLI for the happy path, MCP for the exploratory/interactive path.