MCP has some schemas though. CLI is a bit of a mess.

But MCP today isn’t ideal. I think we need to have some catalogs where the agents can fetch more information about MCP services instead of filling the context with not relevant noise.

Why are they using JSON in the context? I thought we'd figured out that the extra syntax was a waste of tokens?

Can LLMs compress those documents into smaller files that still retain the full context?

You just reinvented Skills

I've seen folks say that the future of using computers will be with an LLM that generates code on the fly to accomplish tasks. I think this is a bit ridiculous, but I do think that operating computers through natural language instructions is superior for a lot of cases and that seems to be where we are headed.

I can see a future where software is built with a CLI interface underneath the (optional) GUI, letting an LLM hook directly into the underlying "business" logic to drive the application. Since LLM's are basically text machines, we just need somebody to invent a text-driven interface for them to use...oh wait!

Imagine booking a flight - the LLM connects to whatever booking software, pulls a list of commands, issues commands to the software, and then displays the output to the user in some fashion. It's basically just one big language translation task, something an LLM is best at, but you still have the guardrails of the CLI tool itself instead of having the LLM generate arbitrary code.

Another benefit is that the CLI output is introspectable. You can trace everything the LLM is doing if you want, as well as validate its commands if necessary (I want to check before it uses my credit card). You don't get this if it's generating a python script to hit some API.

Even before LLM's developers have been writing GUI applications as basically a CLI + GUI for testability, separation of concerns etc. Hopefully that will become more common.

Also this article was obviously AI generated. I'm not going to share my feelings about that.

Cheaper, but is it more effective?

I know I saw something about the Next.js devs experimenting with just dumping an entire index of doc files into AGENTS.md and it being used significantly more by Claude than any skills/tool call stuff.

A lot of providers already have native CLI tools with usually better auth support and longer sessions than MCP as well as more data in their training set on how to use those cli tools for many things. So why convert mcp->cli tool instead of using the existing cli tools in the first place? Using the atlassian MCP is dog shit for example, but using acli is great. Same for github, aws, etc.

I had deepseek explain MCP to me. Then I asked what was the point of persistent connections and it said it was pretty much hipster bullshit and that some url to post to is really enough for an llm to interact with things.

[dead]

The article's link to clihub.sh is broken. Looks like https://clihub.org/ is the correct link? I've added that to the toptext as well.

Edit: took out because I think that was something different.