Posted by ejholmes 13 hours ago
If you’re vibing and doing the open claw thing without any security concerns; then you’re absolutely right.
The harder unsolved problem is the right side: what happens to the output before it becomes consequential action. Neither a CLI nor an MCP server tells you whether the text the agent just generated is compliant, scoped, or admissible. That enforcement problem exists regardless of which invocation pattern you prefer.
The best CLI in the world doesn't help you when the agent produces a clinical summary that omits a contraindication or a financial disclosure that drifts outside regulatory bounds. That's a different layer entirely — and it's mostly being ignored while everyone argues about transport protocols.
In web/cloud based environment, giving a cli to the agent is not easy. Codemode comes to mind but often the tool is externalized anyway so mcp comes handy. Standardisation of auth makes sense in these environments too.
It's maybe not optimal to conclude anything from these two. The Vienna school of AI agents focuses on self extending agents and that's not really compatible with MCP. There are lots of other approaches where MCP is very entrenched and probably will stick around.
You need agent to find MCP and what it can be used for (context), similarly you can write what CLI use for e.g. jira.
Rest is up to agent, it needs to list what it can do in MCP, similarly CLI with proper help text will list that.
Regarding context those tools are exactly the same.
When measuring speed running blue team CTFs ("Breaking BOTS" talk at Chaos Congress), I saw about a ~2x difference in speed (~= tokens) for a database usage between curl (~skills) vs mcp (~python). In theory you can rewrite the mcp into the skill as .md/.py, but at that point ... .
Also I think some people are talking past one another in these discussions. The skill format is a folder that supports dropping in code files, so much of what MCP does can be copy-pasted into that. However, many people discussing skills mean markdown-only and letting the LLM do the rest, which would require a fancy bootstrapping period to make as smooth as the code version. I'd agree that skills, when a folder coming with code, does feel like largely obviating MCPs for solo use cases, until you consider remote MCPs & OAuth, which seem unaddressed and core in practice for wider use.