What do you find difficult about writing MCPs? I havent worked much with them but it seems easy enough. I made an MCP that integrates with jenkins so I can deploy code from claude (not totally useful cause can just make a few cli commands), but still took like 10 mins and works flawlessly.

But I suppose yeah, why not just write clis and have an llm call them

Writing one off simple MCPs are quite easy but once you need to manage a fleet of them, it gets hairy.

- Writing manifests and schemas by hand takes too long for small or iterative tools. Even minor schema changes often require re-registration or manual syncing. There’s no good “just run this script and expose it” path yet.

- Running and testing an MCP locally is awkward. You don’t get fast iteration loops or rich error messages. When something fails, the debugging surface is too opaque - you end up guessing what part broke (manifest, transport, or tool logic).

- There’s no consistent registry, versioning, or discovery story. Sharing or updating MCPs across environments feels ad hoc, and you often have to wire everything manually each time.

With Skills you need none of them - instruct to invoke a tool and be done with it.