Why is this the right way to go? It's not solving the problem it looks like it's solving. If your challenge is that you need to communicate with a foreign API, the obvious solution to that is a progressively discoverable CLI or API specification --- the normal tool developers use.

The reason we have MCP is because early agent designs couldn't run arbitrary CLIs. Once you can run commands, MCP becomes silly.

There is a clear problem that you'd like an "automatic" solution for, but it's not "we don't have a standard protocol that captures every possible API shape", it's "we need a good way to simulate what a CLI does for agents that can't run bash".

Yes, this has been the gradual evolution of AI context and tooling. Same thing is occurring with some of the use cases of a vector DB and RAG. Once you can have the agent interact with the already existing conventional data store using existing queries, there is no point in introducing that work flow for inference.

A lot of the reasons to use MCP are contained in the architecture document (https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25/arc...) and others. Among them, chief is security, but then there's standardization of AI-specific features, and all the features you need in a distributed system with asynchronous tasks and parallel operation. There is a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with calling tools.

For any sufficiently complex set of AI tasks, you will eventually need to invent MCP. The article posted here talks about those cases and reasons. However, there are cases when you should not use MCP, and the article points those out too.

I am creator of HasMCP (my response could have a little bias). Not everyone has home/work computer by preference mostly. I know a lot of people just use iPad or Android tablet in addition to their phone. They still use applications to work on the things. This number is not a small amount of people. They need to access openworld data or service specific data. This is where MCP is still the one of the best ways.

It tries to standardize the auth, messaging, feedback loop where API can't do alone. A CLI app can do for sure but we are talking about a standard maybe the way is something like mcpcli that you can install your phone but still would you really prefer installing bunch of application to your personal device?

Some points that MCP is still not good as of today:

- It does not have a standard to manage context in a good way. You have to find your hack. The mostly accepted one search, add/rm tool. Another one is cataloging the tools.

- lack of client tooling to support elicitation on many clients (it really hurts productivity but this is not solved with cli too)

- lack of mcp-ui adoption (mcp-ui vs openai mcp app)

I would suggest keep building to help you and your users. I am not sponsor of MCP, just sharing my personal opinion. I am also creator HasCLI but kindly biased for MCP then CLI in terms of coverage and standardization.

For the Agent to use CLI, don't we have to install CLI in the run-time environment first? Instead for the MCP over streamable HTTP we don't have to install anything and just specify the tool call in the context in't it?

CLI doesn’t work for your coworkers that aren’t technical.

Have you tried to use a random API before? It’s a process of trial and error.

With the MCP tools I use, it works the first time and every time. There is no “figuring out.”

It's significantly more difficult to secure random clis than those apis. All llm tools today bypass their ignore files by running commands their harness can't control.

> Why is this the right way to go? It's not solving the problem it looks like it's solving. If your challenge is that you need to communicate with a foreign API, the obvious solution to that is a progressively discoverable CLI or API specification --- the normal tool developers use.

That sounds like a hack to get around the lack of MCP. If your goal is to expose your tools through an interface that a coding agent can easily parse and use, what compels you to believe throwing amorphous structured text is a better fit than exposing it through a protocol specially designed to provide context to a model?

> The reason we have MCP is because early agent designs couldn't run arbitrary CLIs. Once you can run commands, MCP becomes silly.

I think you got it backwards. Early agents couldn't handle, and the problem was solved with the introduction of an interface that models can easily handle. It became a solved problem. Now you only argue that if today's models work hard enough, they can be willed into doing something with tools without requiring a MCP. That's neat, but a silly way to reinvent the wheel - poorly.

no, it's all about auth. MCP lets less-technical people plug their existing tools into agents. They can click through the auth flow in about 10 seconds and everything just works. They cannot run CLIs because they're not running anything locally, they're just using some web app. The creator of the app just needed to support MCP and they got connectivity with just about everything else that supports MCP.