CLIs, usually they just work better. I was recently using the Chronosphere MCP server and got great results from it. Then one day it just stopped authenticating. My key was still valid but try as I might I could not use the MCP server anymore. So I just said

"Use the Chronosphere key at $ENVVAR and make yourself a CLI that uses the Chronosphere API. All I need you to do is run PromQL queries, whatever that API is"

And it wrote it in 60s and it works perfectly. I get the same results I got from the MCP server except there is less overhead, both in context and in my mind.