← Back to context

Comment by fny

8 hours ago

I hate MCP servers

That said the core argument for MCP servers is providing an LLM a guard-railed API around some enterprise service. A gmail integration is a great example. Without MCP, you need a VM as scratch space, some way to refresh OAuth, and some way to prevent your LLM from doing insane things like deleting half of your emails. An MCP server built by trusted providers solves all of these problems.

But that's not what happened.

Developers and Anthropic got coked up about the whole thing and extended the concept to nuts and bolts. I always found the example servers useless and hilarious.[0] Unbelievably, they're still maintained.

[0]: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...

6 comments

fny

Reply
ejholmes  6 hours ago

I always get a kick out of seeing MCP wrappers around CLI’s.

  • alejo  6 hours ago

    In my experience, a skill is better suited for this instead of an MCP.

    If you don’t want the agent to probe the CLI when it needs it, a skill can describe the commands, arguments and flags so the agent can use them as needed.

  • cglan  6 hours ago

    They make a big difference. For example if you use the Jira cli, most LLMs aren’t trained on it. A simple MCP wrapper makes a huge difference in usability unless you’re okay having the LLM poke and prod a bunch of different commands

    • ithkuil  28 minutes ago

      Fwiw I'm having a good experience with a skill using Jira CLI directly. My first attempt using a Jira MCP failed. I didn't invest much time debugging the MCP issues, I just switched to the skill and it just worked.

      Yes occasionally Claude uses the wrong flag and it has to retry the command (I didn't even bother to fork the skill and add some memory about the bad flag) but in practice it just works

    • bmurphy1976  5 hours ago

      Do you mean wrap the CLI with an MCP? I don't get that approach. I wrapped the Jira cli with a skill. It's taken a few iterations to dial it in but it works pretty damn well now.

      I'm good, yet my coworkers keep having problems using the Atlassian MCP.