Comment by tcbrah
8 days ago
the maintenance burden is the real MCP killer nobody talks about. your agent needs github? now you depend on some npm package wrapping an API that already had good docs. i just shell out to gh cli and curl - when the API changes, the agent reads updated docs and adapts. with MCP you wait on a middleman to update a wrapper.
tptacek nailed it - once agents run bash, MCP is overhead. the security argument is weird too, it shipped without auth and now claims security as chief benefit. chroot jails and scoped tokens solved this decades ago.
only place MCP wins is oauth flows for non-technical users who will never open a terminal. for dev tooling? just write better CLIs.
the maintenance burden is the real MCP killer nobody talks about.
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for dev tooling? just write better CLIs.
You realize those custom CLIs you're writing will now need to be maintained too, right?
fair point, but there's a difference between maintaining a CLI you own vs depending on a third party to maintain a wrapper around an API you could call directly. not to mention the mcp protocol is fairly nascent whereas CLIs are much more battle-tested