FWIW, it appears that using the gh cli is much more token efficient than MCP so that's a plus.

https://medium.com/@ravi.madabhushi/mcp-is-up-to-32-more-exp...

I see benchmarks a lot working on this, and I honestly think there’s too many things to cover in this comment but: - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too - even with the above, talks of the raw token count don’t consider that for very long trajectories the prompt cache amortises much of this cost, and a feature of MCP is you can also customise the tools to a select subset, and that’s powerful - you can add tool confirmations for write/destructive actions trivially - the old training data on CLIs is good but actually for new features the fact MCP advertises them is also a bonus, but that takes longer to see, MCP isn’t that old

There are many more aspects, but even with GitHub MCP, where the agent has a huge amount of pre-training on the CLI, there are still reasons why people use it extensively - you don’t hear it a lot here but suffice to say usage never stopped growing to this day.

I think if CLIs are working for you then good, I also like our cli and did some work on it too, like adding gh skill subcommand.

Do use what works, and measure and improve - but this article is not doing justice to the MCP server IMHO.