Comment by kaydub
9 hours ago
I avoid most MCPs. They tend to take more context than getting the LLM to script and ingest ouputs. Trying to use JIRA MCP was a mess, way better to have the LLM hit the API, figure out our custom schemas, then write a couple scripts to do exactly what I need to do. Now those scripts are reusable, way less context used.
I don't know, to me it seems like the LLM cli tools are the current pinnacle. All the LLM companies are throwing a ton of shit at the wall to see what else they can get to stick.
For Jira/Confluence, I also struggled with their MCPs. JIRA’s MCPs was hit or miss and Confluence never worked for me.
We don’t use the cloud versions, so not sure if they work better with cloud.
On the other hand, i found some unofficial CLIs for both and they work great.
I wrote a small skill just to give enough detail about how to format Epics, Stories, etc and then some guidance on formatting content and I can get the agent do anything i need with them.
I deal with a ton of different atlassian instances and the most infuriating thing to me about the mcp configuration is that atlassian really thinks you should only have one atlassian instance to auth against. Their mcp auth window takes you to a webpage where you can’t see which thing you are authoring against forcing you to paste the login page url into an incognito window. Pretty half baked implementation.
I noticed that it’s better for some things than others. It’s pretty bad at working with confluence it just eats tokens but if you outlay a roadmap you want created or updated in Jira it’s pretty good at that
I have had some positive experiences using the Jira and Confluence MCPs. However, I use a third-party MCP because my company has a data centre deployment of Jira and Confluence, which the official Atlassian MCP does not support.
My use case was for using it as an advanced search tool rather than for creating tickets or documentation. Considering how poor the Confluence search function is, the results from Confluence via an MCP-powered search are remarkably good. I was able to solve one or two obscure, company-specific issues purely by using the MCP search, and I'm convinced that finding these pages would have been almost impossible without it.