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Comment by fnordpiglet

17 hours ago

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is very hard to get to use an MCP if literally any Bash() approach is possible, including breaking glass to find creds, even when an MCP is clearly advertised in CLAUDE.md, skills, and explicit user instruction. I find it fascinating that Anthropic makes a product that seems to be really poor at following instructions and OpenAI seems to generally follow guard rails.

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fnordpiglet

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ex-aws-dude  16 hours ago

Isn’t that basically just a —help flag though?

Still easily doable with CLI

  • 0123456789ABCDE  13 hours ago

    > Isn’t that basically just a --help flag though?

    mostly, but not enough — i have been experimenting with this, and what i found to help is:

      - help menu is the default, not an error message to stderr. ex: `gh pr` and `gh pr --help` are byte identical
  - if the subcommand, or the options passed are wrong, present suggestions. ex: `gh gists` -> "Did you meant this? gist"
  - the help menu should provide examples like `tldr`. sprites.dev tool `sprite` does this well, `gh` is in the training set so theirs is shorter
  - can you append the docs url to the bottom of the help menu?
  - you're serving llms.txt, right?

troupo  6 hours ago

> One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape.

So, OpenAPI/Swagger for REST? GraphQL? SOAP schemas? All of these (and more) exist. What does MCP add that these don't have?

dnautics  16 hours ago

i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.