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Posted by ejholmes 16 hours ago

When does MCP make sense vs CLI?(ejholmes.github.io)
369 points | 232 commentspage 9
novaleaf 12 hours ago|
genuine question: how would you turn a debugger-mcp into a CLI? do CLI tools used in agents have the concept of persistence?
nicoritschel 11 hours ago||
MCPs were always for chat apps, not coding agents. Benefit is auth for normies + can serve UI through ChatGPT + Claude.
wrs 12 hours ago||
And for anything at all complicated, what’s even better than a CLI is a JS or Python library so the thing can just write code.
jitl 12 hours ago||
on the other hand, MCP/tools style lets me run specialized agents without needing to give them a bash-like unix environment. Vercel makes a fake bash simulator but if i’m trying to run an agent that analyzes production telemetry, it’s a hell of a lot easier to do that safely with just MCP
ako 15 hours ago||
Biggest downside of CLI for me is that it needs to run in a container. You're allowing the agent to run CLI tools, so you need to limit what it can do.
wolttam 15 hours ago||
It gets significantly harder to isolate the authentication details when the model has access to a shell, even in a container. The CLI tool that the model is running may need to access the environment or some credentials file, and what's to stop the model from accessing those credentials directly?

It breaks most assumptions we have about the shell's security model.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 15 hours ago||
Couldn't that be solved by whitelisting specific commands?
wolttam 15 hours ago|||
Such a mechanism would need to be implemented at `execve`, because it would be too easy for the model to stuff the command inside a script or other executable.
g947o 13 hours ago|||
Give it a try, and challenge yourself (or ChatGPT) to break it.

You'll quickly realize that this is not feasible.

morissette 11 hours ago||
I’ve been using the command line tools except for teams integration which I use MCP for
swaraj 4 hours ago||
This is spot on
lukol 15 hours ago||
Couldn't agree more. Simple REST APIs often do the job as well. MCP felt like a vibe-coded fever dream from the start.
raw_anon_1111 6 hours ago|
This is the dumbest most myopic take I’ve seen in awhile. MCP servers aren’t just used for geeks using Claude Code. If I have an app in production that uses an MCP server what is he suggesting? That my LLM create a shell script and run it inside of a Docker container?
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