Posted by knowsuchagency 6 hours ago
mcp2cli turns any MCP server or OpenAPI spec into a CLI at runtime. The LLM discovers tools on demand:
mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse --list # ~16 tokens/tool
mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse create-task --help # ~120 tokens, once
mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse create-task --title "Fix bug"
Token savings are real, measured with cl100k_base: 96% for 30 tools over 15 turns, 99% for 120 tools over 25 turns.
It also ships as an installable skill for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex): `npx skills add knowsuchagency/mcp2cli --skill mcp2cli`
Inspired by Kagan Yilmaz's CLI vs MCP analysis and CLIHub.
Essentially I've cloned thousands of mcp servers, used the readmes and the star rating to respond to the qdrant query (star ratings as a boost score have been an attack vector, yes I know, it's an incomplete product [1]), then presents it as a JSON response with "one-shots" which this author calls clis.
I think I became discouraged from working on it and moved on because my results weren't that great but search is hard and I shouldn't give up.
I'll get back on it seeing how good this tool is getting traction.
[1] There needs to be a legitimacy post-filter so that github user micr0s0ft or what-have-you doesn't go to to the top - I'm sure there's some best-of-practice ways of doing this and I shouldn't invent my own (which would involve seeing if the repo appears on non-UGC sites I guess?!) but I haven't looked into it
You might as well directly create a CLI tool that works with the AI agents which does an API call to the service anyway.