Comment by notepad0x90

Strongly disagree, despite that meaning I'm swimming upstream here.

Unlike cli flags, with MCP I can tune the comments for the tool more easily (for my own MCPs at least) than a cli flag. You can only put so much in a cli --help output. The error handling and debugability is also nicer.

Heck, I would even favor writing an MCP tool to wrap cli commands. It's easier for me to ensure dangerous flags or parameters aren't used, and to ensure concrete restrictions and checks are in place. If you control the cli tools it isn't as bad, but if you don't, and it isn't a well known cli tool, the agent might need things like vague errors explaing to it a bit.

MCP is more like "REST" or "GRPC", at the simplest level just think of it as a wrapper.

You mentioned redirecting to files, what if the output is too much that way, you'll still burn tokens. But with MCP, if the output is too much you can count the tokens and limit, or... better yet you can paginate so that it gets some results, it sees how many results there are and either decides to re-run the tool with params that will yield less results, or consume the results page-by-page.