I would spend less time with theory and more time with practice to understand what people are getting at. MCP and CLI could, in theory, be the same. But in practice as it stands today, they are not.

> MCP is just a way to write this in a structured way,

Nope! You are not understanding or are actively ignoring the difference which has been explained by 20+ comments just here. It's not a controversial claim, it's a mutually agreed upon matter of fact by the relevant community of users.

The claim you're making right now is believed to be false, and if you know something everyone else doesn't, then you should create an example repo that shows the playwright CLI and playwright MCP add the same number of tokens to context and that both are equally configurable in this respect.

If you can get that right where so many others have failed, that would be a a really big contribution. And if you can't, then you'll understand something first-hand that you weren't able to get while you were thinking about theoretically.

> then you should create an example repo that shows the playwright CLI and playwright MCP add the same number of tokens to context and that both are equally configurable in this respect

That's just implementation detail of how your agent harness decides to use MCP. CLI and MCP are on different abstraction layers. You can have your MCP available through CLI if you wish so.