> Provide CLI -> API -> docs, in that order. LLMs already learned from man pages and StackOverflow.
So how is the agent going to know about your niche CLI? It's still going to use up context to learn your command line interface, same as for an MCP interface.
Agents only excel at CLIs if a particular CLI was part of their training data. The same would be true of well-known MCP interfaces.
> Alternative 2: Skills Pattern
> If MCP is "spreading all menus on the table upfront", Skills is "asking the librarian for only the book you need".
Or: Layer your MCP help commands, like a directory at a mall. The agent only looks up what it needs at the time.
2026. Oh woe, the MCP that all the companies are giving me isn't ideal.
2028? oh woe, the CLI that calls the REST API, that calls the MCP that all the companies are giving me..
- MCPs are great for stateless, mostly read-only interactions with document store type things. Notion/Slack/Linear are perfect use cases. I have those MCPs connected to claude code and they work great. These tools never had CLIs or super well used public APIs to begin with. MCP handles the auth for me. Cool.
- MCPs are great but not fully necessary for "function shaped" things where you're trying to run some Function and that Function has a lot of parameters with some subtlety to them and perhaps needs some examples to really help the LLM understand. Though you can get away with a skill + curl, or a hand rolled script even.
- MCPs are not so great for interacting with more complex stateful systems with large surface area. You don't want/need an AWS MCP, for example. And of course Cloudflare is the canonical example here where they do have an MCP but it has a special "Code Mode" because they have a huge product surface and a lot of state.
Most companies are somewhere in the vast space between being a document store type thing and AWS, so aren't really sure what their MCP should look like, or how customers will use it, but feel like they're missing the boat if they don't ship something. So they ship an MCP and perhaps the people who need the document type stuff load it up and get some use out of it, but others are not so satisfied. Or maybe from the other direction, people are trying to use your product but aren't super technical or don't know how to best use it with AI, but "loading up an MCP" seems like a reasonable way to start, so they ask everyone "Where's your MCP"?
I run into this at work all the time. We get a lot of requests for an MCP. But our product is not so simple to just stuff into a bunch of stateless API calls. And we question whether the people requesting the MCP really know what they want it for, exactly, other than to hook up to claude code so they can say "claude go do everything" (which is a valid sentiment, but implies a lot of work on our end to figure out how to make that work well).
The second you utter the word git, you may have lost 90% of your audience - depending on their background, of course. MCPs are a lot more non-tech friendly
Its not that hard.
i dont understand why people are so invested in making this a winner-take-all battle. skills are ligthweight and ad-hoc, MCP is managed and centralized. there's a place for both of those things, even if your personal workflow only needs skills.
We have b2b enterprise solutions for sharing text files; we have 1st party, security approved methods for distributing source code that are fundamentally business friendly and compatible with using skills.
MCP might have a place, but claiming it exists because you need a more “enterprise” solution to distributing prompts is just enormously difficult to justify.
(Unless, as the other peer comment indicates, you're not actually trying to make things better or useful, you're trying to sell access to your MCP server. I admit, I take it back; if shilling your company is all you care about maybe MCP is a better option)