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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Silly. All it needs is docs. No need to overcomplicate it.