Comment by varenc
14 hours ago
The value is that many companies like building MCP servers much more than CLIs. For whatever reason.
Here's some companies that offer MCP servers but don't seem to offer an equally featured CLI:
- Asana
- Square
- Linear
- Dropbox
- Canva
- Slack (sorta)
- Figma (sorta)
and many more that offer both, but support their MCP more.
Should they all be offering CLI tools? IMHO, yes absolutely. But an MCP server gets much more interest. I'd rather encourage them to keep improving and supporting their MCP services than telling them to drop it for a CLI.
There's lots of things like this in technology where you end up stuck with the first thing because its popularity perpetuates itself. The QWERTY keyboard I'm typing this on is a prime example. x86 is another one.
A CLI needs to work on windows, mac, linux, android, iOS, etc. And it still needs some backend APIs to call. So creating one is a lot more work than just making an MCP.
That kind of code is easily portable in C or Rust or Go or Java or Python so long as it is a CLI and not GUI.
[dead]
The mcp support gets more support because there is no cli.