5 ms·

You failed to describe what value the MCP protocol provides. If all of these companies spent equivalent time writing a CLI for agents to consume as they spend

You failed to describe what value the MCP protocol provides. If all of these companies spent equivalent time writing a CLI for agents to consume as they spend on MCP servers, would they be any worse off in terms of agents being able to interact with their products?

cle 5mo ago
The security model and runtime requirements are completely different between making an HTTP request and executing arbitrary code. They have different tradeoffs.
- lostmsu 5mo ago
  You nailed it! There are established tools that handle the security model. MCP is the 5th leg.
fnordpiglet 5mo ago
One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is very hard to get to use an MCP if literally any Bash() approach is possible, including breaking glass to find creds, even when an MCP is clearly advertised in CLAUDE.md, skills, and explicit user instruction. I find it fascinating that Anthropic makes a product that seems to be really poor at following instructions and OpenAI seems to generally follow guard rails.
- dnautics 5mo ago
  i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.
  - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
    MCP is more than is more than tools. Tools is one of three major features: prompts[0] and resources[1] being the other two. Prompts are effectively "server delivered skills" which are are quite powerful because it solves a distribution and synchronization problem. It also allows server materialization and dynamic construction of skills. MCP also has a few other under utilized mechanisms: elicitation[2] on the client side and completions on the server side[3]. It is an API of sorts, but specialized for agent harness <-> server interactions. [0] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/ https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/ [1] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/ https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/ [2] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/client/elicitation https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/cli... [3] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/server/utilities/completion https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/ser...
    - dnautics 5mo ago
      can these not be surfaced in an api and accessed using curl, with instructions in a SKILLS.md?
      - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
        Sure. It would be great if they were portable as well. To make them interoperable so that the APIs have similar surface areas and can just be used without special skills, we could even come up with a standard API surface area and create a...protocol. If you squint, the SKILL.md and the context that it takes up is literally the same thing as the MCP server and tool description. They are literally the same thing except one is server delivered and one is not. MCP is "Let's use Google Sheets and have a server-managed experience". Everyone sees the same thing on the server in real time. Skills is "Let me download the Excel and send it back to you". Why? How is this better? Every time I update the Excel, I have to add a `.2026.final.final2.xlsx` and everyone updates their copy...how is this the superior experience?
    - nostrebored 5mo ago
- ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
  Isn’t that basically just a —help flag though? Still easily doable with CLI
  - 0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
    > Isn’t that basically just a --help flag though? mostly, but not enough — i have been experimenting with this, and what i found to help is: - help menu is the default, not an error message to stderr. ex: `gh pr` and `gh pr --help` are byte identical - if the subcommand, or the options passed are wrong, present suggestions. ex: `gh gists` -> "Did you meant this? gist" - the help menu should provide examples like `tldr`. sprites.dev tool `sprite` does this well, `gh` is in the training set so theirs is shorter - can you append the docs url to the bottom of the help menu? - you're serving llms.txt, right?
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  Then give the CLI a man page.
- troupo 5mo ago
  > One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. So, OpenAPI/Swagger for REST? GraphQL? SOAP schemas? All of these (and more) exist. What does MCP add that these don't have?
  - fnordpiglet 5mo ago
    I’m confused by the question. You listed a bunch of standards over time, all of which reach to solve a similar problem (you left off XDR/RPC, CORBA, and about 10000 others), and unironically ask why is there a n+1 standard? Are you genuinely confused? https://xkcd.com/927 https://xkcd.com/927
    - troupo 5mo ago
      You wouldn't be confused if you actually tried to understand what I was saying. . Your claim was: "One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape". This "advantage" has already existed, as you correctly pointed out, in about 10000 other standards and protocols. MCP is not special, and doesnmt have some advantage. It's a vibe-coded hype-driven n+1 standard that is busy ignoring anything that came before it, for no reason.
adastra22 5mo ago
[flagged]
- sandeepkd 5mo ago
  At times I feel like these people are naive and may be do not have enough practical industry experience around software development, and then on second thought I realize that they are way smarter and counting on everyone else being naive here. This is a cycle of FOMO and a temporary phase. Something like MCP is not a one time investment, the API's need to be maintained and updated regularly to be useful. Maintenance work is already a cost factor and no one gets promoted by maintaining anything. Within organizations, smart carrier oriented folks are picking up this area of work for their personal growth and visibility which comes across as if every company is going for it.
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Their comment does not sound like an LLM to me, it doesn't have most of the other tells.
  - Zetaphor 5mo ago
    People forget these things learned to speak English by reading conversations like this.
- itsmek 5mo ago
  Also a dead giveaway: >That's what matters
- Kaliboy 5mo ago
  Did you consider that maybe he has different information than you do, and thus he holds a different opinion? I for one love MCP. It's way faster in my experience than skills / shell. And I like how (with Claude Code) I can setup the MCP in the web interface, use it in the chat and the CLI. Plus the flow to add an MCP via the browser is achievable to any user. And one thing I don't understand of skills is this. I have an MCP for my life organisation app that authorizes via OAuth. The flow is fully via the browser so I can use the app session and its stored somewhere in claude.ai. How does authentication work with skills?
827a 5mo ago
Yes, in the same way a programming language would be worse off if they focused all of their effort on building an implementation instead of a language specification. You could literally, deterministically, zero AI, code-gen a CLI from an MCP specification, just like you can with an OpenAPI specification. I'm sure tools exist that do this. So if you want a CLI, there it is. But the problem with a CLI is that it requires a shell environment, and not everywhere you may want to run an agent should or can have access to a shell. MCP enables the harness to tightly control that access. MCP allows the user to easily allowlist/denylist specific tools, or categorize tools into "ask me every time" versus "don't ask me just do it". Doing any of this with a CLI is really hard because CLIs are all very different; yes, AIs can easily learn how to use them, but that might be exactly what you don't want, hey AI don't issue that aws ec2 delete-instance command ah crap there it goes I wish I could have just denylisted its access to that tool.
- jimbokun 5mo ago
  So the permissions model h is a the main advantage MCP has over CLIs?
  - usrusr 5mo ago
    Is that so surprising? I thought that was a given. And as soon as remote resources are involved, the old "it's in a docker" peace of mind does not apply.
- fmbb 5mo ago
  You prevent the LLM from deleting your instances by not granting its AWS user that permission. Whatever tool you let it use to talk to AWS is irrelevant.
- _flux 5mo ago
  Not having access to the shell is a big hindrance. I have my agent access Gitlab and Jira via CLI tools and in so many cases jq or python is used to manipulate or combine the data into a more useful format, making use of pipes and temporary files. You can of course limit what an agent can do, most easily by not giving it access to things it shouldn't do. I suppose there are no existing easy gateway methods to grant fine-grained OS-level permissions to add such things back, except perhaps `sudo` and similar tools. MCPs are impossible to combine this way: everything you feed or get from them goes though the model and consumes tokens.
eddythompson80 5mo ago
Not a fan of MCPs for my personal use, but I still think the value for companies is obvious. The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. You only need to "trust" the MCP client implementation, not a thousand different CLIs. Also being a standard HTTP endpoint, a lot of logic can be offloaded to proxies and such. The second value is more about how business works. There is no chance you can convince someone at WalMart to fund and release a `wmctl` that allows you to search and buy products. Now try to convince your regional Pizza chain to release a CLI too. WalMart and such are incentivized however to create "Whatever OpenAI and Anthropic integrate with". Shopify can create an MCP for every shop and allow the shop owner to customize it. Creating a CLI per shop makes no sense. OpenAI and Anthropic prefer MCPs because of the first benefit. So it works out for all parties involved.
- wren6991 5mo ago
  > The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. Is this an advantage? Phrased differently, every MCP that could have been a CLI call is a new opportunity for sandbox escape.
  - eddythompson80 5mo ago
    I don’t follow. It’s the other way around. Would you rather run an arbitrary binary blob (aka: a random cli) or `curl`? Edit: Maybe to clarify, I’m talking about remote MCP. Local MCP is obviously nonsensical. Remote MCP is very much thriving aggressively.
    - wren6991 5mo ago
      If the random blob is running inside of a real sandbox (Landlock/Bubblewrap, VM, ...Docker) then I would take the blob, because I can reason about its capabilities without inspecting its internals. The LLM can run curl as much as it wants if I've `unshare()`d its network access. MCP is an instant obligatory sandbox escape unless I also manage to deploy all the MCP servers inside the sandbox. And yes, sorry, I was talking about local MCP. I should have made that clear. I do see people using local MCP quite a bit (Ghidra MCP, Playwright MCP, etc), but maybe this is more of a hobbyist thing.
varenc 5mo ago
The value is that many companies like building MCP servers much more than CLIs. For whatever reason. Here's some companies that offer MCP servers but don't seem to offer an equally featured CLI: - Asana - Square - Linear - Dropbox - Canva - Slack (sorta) - Figma (sorta) and many more that offer both, but support their MCP more. Should they all be offering CLI tools? IMHO, yes absolutely. But an MCP server gets much more interest. I'd rather encourage them to keep improving and supporting their MCP services than telling them to drop it for a CLI. There's lots of things like this in technology where you end up stuck with the first thing because its popularity perpetuates itself. The QWERTY keyboard I'm typing this on is a prime example. x86 is another one.
- fooster 5mo ago
  The mcp support gets more support because there is no cli.
- didibus 5mo ago
  A CLI needs to work on windows, mac, linux, android, iOS, etc. And it still needs some backend APIs to call. So creating one is a lot more work than just making an MCP.
  - sagrd 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - PaulHoule 5mo ago
    That kind of code is easily portable in C or Rust or Go or Java or Python so long as it is a CLI and not GUI.
    - cindyllm 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - oliculipolicula 5mo ago
      Again, tangential, relevant only in that CLI "portability coolness" captures only some of the meaningfulness Having slept on the poorly made point I was trying to stick. I'm aware its still all tell no show )-: A comment worthy of hacker news highlights, Amish-made, fully earnest! Would appeal to people with money, all manner of handlers, enbies born to embrace struggle, not to mention portability porn addicts. All things to all people but without the messianic contingent An Amish who might well have built a Space Lasers Platform at Bell Labs! Should perhaps be the character to learn how to play. This same Amish character would only use CLIs, on a wooden nonelectronic keyboard I credit the obvious (to you) people here (incl you again) for this concept of an idea. Molon labe Update: backrooms is getting serious traction in Indonesia. Ask me in a year if it was only meta-interest
hobofan 5mo ago
Yes they would be. MCP servers on the side of the consuming organizations fit into the existing IT landscape, with centralized safeguard on who can access what a lot better and are easier to administer than letting their employees run arbitrary agents against arbitrary sources and destinations and cause chaos.
0x696C6961 5mo ago
I have a couple MCP servers connected to my Claude web & mobile clients. How would your clis work there?

cle 5mo ago

The security model and runtime requirements are completely different between making an HTTP request and executing arbitrary code. They have different tradeoffs.

lostmsu 5mo ago
You nailed it! There are established tools that handle the security model. MCP is the 5th leg.

fnordpiglet 5mo ago

One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. Unless your CLI is in the corpus with lots of examples the agent has to learn every time. Skills help a little bit but I find the recall on skills pretty low. However I also find codex will reliably use MCPs advertised while Claude always reaches for tools like Bash() likely because it’s aligned so heavily on its own tools and is very hard to get to use an MCP if literally any Bash() approach is possible, including breaking glass to find creds, even when an MCP is clearly advertised in CLAUDE.md, skills, and explicit user instruction. I find it fascinating that Anthropic makes a product that seems to be really poor at following instructions and OpenAI seems to generally follow guard rails.

dnautics 5mo ago
i mean you can surface an openapi schema too.
- CharlieDigital 5mo ago
  MCP is more than is more than tools. Tools is one of three major features: prompts[0] and resources[1] being the other two. Prompts are effectively "server delivered skills" which are are quite powerful because it solves a distribution and synchronization problem. It also allows server materialization and dynamic construction of skills. MCP also has a few other under utilized mechanisms: elicitation[2] on the client side and completions on the server side[3]. It is an API of sorts, but specialized for agent harness <-> server interactions. [0] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/ https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/prompts/ [1] https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/ https://modelcontextprotocol.info/docs/concepts/resources/ [2] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/client/elicitation https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/cli... [3] https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/server/utilities/completion https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/ser...
  - dnautics 5mo ago
    can these not be surfaced in an api and accessed using curl, with instructions in a SKILLS.md?
    - CharlieDigital 5mo ago
      Sure. It would be great if they were portable as well. To make them interoperable so that the APIs have similar surface areas and can just be used without special skills, we could even come up with a standard API surface area and create a...protocol. If you squint, the SKILL.md and the context that it takes up is literally the same thing as the MCP server and tool description. They are literally the same thing except one is server delivered and one is not. MCP is "Let's use Google Sheets and have a server-managed experience". Everyone sees the same thing on the server in real time. Skills is "Let me download the Excel and send it back to you". Why? How is this better? Every time I update the Excel, I have to add a `.2026.final.final2.xlsx` and everyone updates their copy...how is this the superior experience?
  - nostrebored 5mo ago
ex-aws-dude 5mo ago
Isn’t that basically just a —help flag though? Still easily doable with CLI
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
  > Isn’t that basically just a --help flag though? mostly, but not enough — i have been experimenting with this, and what i found to help is: - help menu is the default, not an error message to stderr. ex: `gh pr` and `gh pr --help` are byte identical - if the subcommand, or the options passed are wrong, present suggestions. ex: `gh gists` -> "Did you meant this? gist" - the help menu should provide examples like `tldr`. sprites.dev tool `sprite` does this well, `gh` is in the training set so theirs is shorter - can you append the docs url to the bottom of the help menu? - you're serving llms.txt, right?
jimbokun 5mo ago
Then give the CLI a man page.
troupo 5mo ago
> One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape. So, OpenAPI/Swagger for REST? GraphQL? SOAP schemas? All of these (and more) exist. What does MCP add that these don't have?
- fnordpiglet 5mo ago
  I’m confused by the question. You listed a bunch of standards over time, all of which reach to solve a similar problem (you left off XDR/RPC, CORBA, and about 10000 others), and unironically ask why is there a n+1 standard? Are you genuinely confused? https://xkcd.com/927 https://xkcd.com/927
  - troupo 5mo ago
    You wouldn't be confused if you actually tried to understand what I was saying. . Your claim was: "One advantage is the MCP advertises itself to the agent with its schema and api shape". This "advantage" has already existed, as you correctly pointed out, in about 10000 other standards and protocols. MCP is not special, and doesnmt have some advantage. It's a vibe-coded hype-driven n+1 standard that is busy ignoring anything that came before it, for no reason.

adastra22 5mo ago

[flagged]

sandeepkd 5mo ago
At times I feel like these people are naive and may be do not have enough practical industry experience around software development, and then on second thought I realize that they are way smarter and counting on everyone else being naive here. This is a cycle of FOMO and a temporary phase. Something like MCP is not a one time investment, the API's need to be maintained and updated regularly to be useful. Maintenance work is already a cost factor and no one gets promoted by maintaining anything. Within organizations, smart carrier oriented folks are picking up this area of work for their personal growth and visibility which comes across as if every company is going for it.
satvikpendem 5mo ago
Their comment does not sound like an LLM to me, it doesn't have most of the other tells.
- Zetaphor 5mo ago
  People forget these things learned to speak English by reading conversations like this.
itsmek 5mo ago
Also a dead giveaway: >That's what matters
Kaliboy 5mo ago
Did you consider that maybe he has different information than you do, and thus he holds a different opinion? I for one love MCP. It's way faster in my experience than skills / shell. And I like how (with Claude Code) I can setup the MCP in the web interface, use it in the chat and the CLI. Plus the flow to add an MCP via the browser is achievable to any user. And one thing I don't understand of skills is this. I have an MCP for my life organisation app that authorizes via OAuth. The flow is fully via the browser so I can use the app session and its stored somewhere in claude.ai. How does authentication work with skills?

827a 5mo ago

Yes, in the same way a programming language would be worse off if they focused all of their effort on building an implementation instead of a language specification. You could literally, deterministically, zero AI, code-gen a CLI from an MCP specification, just like you can with an OpenAPI specification. I'm sure tools exist that do this. So if you want a CLI, there it is. But the problem with a CLI is that it requires a shell environment, and not everywhere you may want to run an agent should or can have access to a shell. MCP enables the harness to tightly control that access. MCP allows the user to easily allowlist/denylist specific tools, or categorize tools into "ask me every time" versus "don't ask me just do it". Doing any of this with a CLI is really hard because CLIs are all very different; yes, AIs can easily learn how to use them, but that might be exactly what you don't want, hey AI don't issue that aws ec2 delete-instance command ah crap there it goes I wish I could have just denylisted its access to that tool.

jimbokun 5mo ago
So the permissions model h is a the main advantage MCP has over CLIs?
- usrusr 5mo ago
  Is that so surprising? I thought that was a given. And as soon as remote resources are involved, the old "it's in a docker" peace of mind does not apply.
fmbb 5mo ago
You prevent the LLM from deleting your instances by not granting its AWS user that permission. Whatever tool you let it use to talk to AWS is irrelevant.
_flux 5mo ago
Not having access to the shell is a big hindrance. I have my agent access Gitlab and Jira via CLI tools and in so many cases jq or python is used to manipulate or combine the data into a more useful format, making use of pipes and temporary files. You can of course limit what an agent can do, most easily by not giving it access to things it shouldn't do. I suppose there are no existing easy gateway methods to grant fine-grained OS-level permissions to add such things back, except perhaps `sudo` and similar tools. MCPs are impossible to combine this way: everything you feed or get from them goes though the model and consumes tokens.

eddythompson80 5mo ago

Not a fan of MCPs for my personal use, but I still think the value for companies is obvious. The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. You only need to "trust" the MCP client implementation, not a thousand different CLIs. Also being a standard HTTP endpoint, a lot of logic can be offloaded to proxies and such. The second value is more about how business works. There is no chance you can convince someone at WalMart to fund and release a `wmctl` that allows you to search and buy products. Now try to convince your regional Pizza chain to release a CLI too. WalMart and such are incentivized however to create "Whatever OpenAI and Anthropic integrate with". Shopify can create an MCP for every shop and allow the shop owner to customize it. Creating a CLI per shop makes no sense. OpenAI and Anthropic prefer MCPs because of the first benefit. So it works out for all parties involved.

wren6991 5mo ago
> The first value for their downstream (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) is REST call vs arbitrary code execution. Is this an advantage? Phrased differently, every MCP that could have been a CLI call is a new opportunity for sandbox escape.
- eddythompson80 5mo ago
  I don’t follow. It’s the other way around. Would you rather run an arbitrary binary blob (aka: a random cli) or `curl`? Edit: Maybe to clarify, I’m talking about remote MCP. Local MCP is obviously nonsensical. Remote MCP is very much thriving aggressively.
  - wren6991 5mo ago
    If the random blob is running inside of a real sandbox (Landlock/Bubblewrap, VM, ...Docker) then I would take the blob, because I can reason about its capabilities without inspecting its internals. The LLM can run curl as much as it wants if I've `unshare()`d its network access. MCP is an instant obligatory sandbox escape unless I also manage to deploy all the MCP servers inside the sandbox. And yes, sorry, I was talking about local MCP. I should have made that clear. I do see people using local MCP quite a bit (Ghidra MCP, Playwright MCP, etc), but maybe this is more of a hobbyist thing.

varenc 5mo ago

The value is that many companies like building MCP servers much more than CLIs. For whatever reason. Here's some companies that offer MCP servers but don't seem to offer an equally featured CLI: - Asana - Square - Linear - Dropbox - Canva - Slack (sorta) - Figma (sorta) and many more that offer both, but support their MCP more. Should they all be offering CLI tools? IMHO, yes absolutely. But an MCP server gets much more interest. I'd rather encourage them to keep improving and supporting their MCP services than telling them to drop it for a CLI. There's lots of things like this in technology where you end up stuck with the first thing because its popularity perpetuates itself. The QWERTY keyboard I'm typing this on is a prime example. x86 is another one.

fooster 5mo ago
The mcp support gets more support because there is no cli.
didibus 5mo ago
A CLI needs to work on windows, mac, linux, android, iOS, etc. And it still needs some backend APIs to call. So creating one is a lot more work than just making an MCP.
- sagrd 5mo ago
  [dead]
- PaulHoule 5mo ago
  That kind of code is easily portable in C or Rust or Go or Java or Python so long as it is a CLI and not GUI.
  - cindyllm 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - oliculipolicula 5mo ago
    Again, tangential, relevant only in that CLI "portability coolness" captures only some of the meaningfulness Having slept on the poorly made point I was trying to stick. I'm aware its still all tell no show )-: A comment worthy of hacker news highlights, Amish-made, fully earnest! Would appeal to people with money, all manner of handlers, enbies born to embrace struggle, not to mention portability porn addicts. All things to all people but without the messianic contingent An Amish who might well have built a Space Lasers Platform at Bell Labs! Should perhaps be the character to learn how to play. This same Amish character would only use CLIs, on a wooden nonelectronic keyboard I credit the obvious (to you) people here (incl you again) for this concept of an idea. Molon labe Update: backrooms is getting serious traction in Indonesia. Ask me in a year if it was only meta-interest

hobofan 5mo ago

Yes they would be. MCP servers on the side of the consuming organizations fit into the existing IT landscape, with centralized safeguard on who can access what a lot better and are easier to administer than letting their employees run arbitrary agents against arbitrary sources and destinations and cause chaos.

0x696C6961 5mo ago

I have a couple MCP servers connected to my Claude web & mobile clients. How would your clis work there?