Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by athrowaway3z 258 days ago
MCP's are toys for point-and-click devs that no self-respecting dev has any business using.

Case in point; I'm mostly a Claude user, which has decent background process / BashOutput support to get a long-running process's stdout.

I was using codex just now, and its processes support is ass.

So I asked it, give me 5 options using cli tools to implement process support. After 3 min back and forth, I got this: https://github.com/offline-ant/shellagent-tools/blob/main/ba...

Add single line in AGENTS.md.

> the `background` tool allows running programs in the background. Calling `background` outputs the help.

Now I can go "background ./server; try thing. investigate" and it has access to the stdout.

Stop pre-trashing your context with MCPs people.
1 comments
laborcontract 258 days ago
Yep. Most MCP servers are best repackaged as a cli tool, and telling the LLM to invoke `toolname --help` to learn how to use it at runtime. The primary downside is that they LLM will have a lower proclivity to invoke those tools unless explicitly reminded to.

If you do like rolling your own MCP servers, I've had great success recently refactoring a bunch of my own to consume fewer tokens by, instead of creating many different tools, consolidating the tools and passing through different arguments.

link