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.”

AussieWog93 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

This actually isn't true. I've written bespoke CLI tools for my small business and non-technical people run them without issue. They get intimidated at first but within a day or so they're completely used to it - it's basically just magic incantations on a black box.

	▲	bonesss 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		CLI’s and shell commands can be wrapped by and packaged into scripts, those scripts can have meaningful names. On Windows at least you can assign special icons to shortcuts to those scripts. I’ve used that approach to get non-technical near-retirees as early adopters of command line tooling (version control and internal apps). A semantic layer to the effect of ‘make-docs, share-docs, get-newest-app, announce-new-app-version’. The users saw a desktop folder with big buttons to double click. Errors opened up an email to devs/support with full details (minimizing error communication errors and time to fix). A few minutes of training, expanded and refined to meet individual needs, and our accountants & SME’s loved SVN/Git. And the discussion was all about process and needs, not about tooling or associated mental models.

▲

JeremyNT 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This should be trivial if you have proper API documentation in something like swagger. You can generate a cli tool with no "figuring out" anything either.

	▲	clintonb 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nothing is “trivial” when you combine humans and computers. I worked at the MIT Computing Help Desk during my undergraduate years. We joked that we received callas from Nobel laureates who could find subatomic particles but couldn’t find the Windows Start button. My company is currently trying to rollout shared MCPs and skills throughout the company. The engineers who have been using AI tools for the past 1-2 years have few, if any, issues. The designers, product managers, and others have numerous issues. Having a single MCP gateway with very clear instructions for connecting to Claude Desktop and authenticating with Google eliminates numerous problems that would arise from installing and authenticating a CLI. The MCP is also available on mobile devices. I can jot down ideas and interact with real data with Claude iOS and the remote MCP. Can’t do that with a CLI.

▲

mkoubaa 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you can't write a good CLI I doubt you could write a good MCP