I don't think MCP is going anywhere, as much as I prefer CLIs or skills generally. Where MCP really shines is reducing friction and footguns for using a service, but at the expense of less versatility and expressiveness. You get a cookie-cutter way of using tools to interact with that service, which is easy to set up, doesn't require the user to download a CLI or have their agent interact with an API

For power users or technical users that want agents to compose data or use tools programmatically, that's less valuable, but for most people, a one-size-fits-all MCP service that is easy to use is probably best

There's the issues of dumping a bunch of tool definitions into context and eating a ton of tokens as well, but that seems more solvable

If anything, MCP needs to evolve or MCP client tooling to improve, and I could see the debate going away

There’s nothing stopping agents from composing MCP requests and responses, or from them writing programs to process the responses. MCP tools and resources are just as composable and programmable than any CLI - and more so than most because they are structured data.