[redhale]

An I losing my mind? I feel like we're making things harder for ourselves. My mantra is: just use CLI tools. Or maybe "CLI tools are all you need"?

"--help" mechanics are already built in so the agent can discover what commands are available and how to use them. The agent can write shell scripts to wrap recurring uses or sequences, and then invoke those via CLI. And there are tons of well-tested existing CLI tools available.

I feel like this article being written with the assumption of MCP forces it to overcomplicate the issue.

Just one example: the Atlassian CLI works much more reliably (generally and as an agent tool) than the Atlassian MCP server. For example, the Atlassian MCP server has weird auth issues ask the time where it will just fail to auth in a session. Atlassian publishes both officially,

[beoberha]

I definitely agree with you, but it’s probably a little apples and oranges. MCP server is a one stop shop for discovering “tools”. To leverage a CLI tool “from scratch”, your agent has to do a web search to find if a CLI tool even exists, figure out how to install it, install it. Not saying those are impossible, but it’s way less automated and “deterministic” than what MCP provides.

[redhale]

I don't quite follow your meaning. Are you referring to an MCP registry of some kind, that the agent would operate itself to discover and install new tools? I would say that is a separate concern from the tool form factor itself. Also, there are CLI-focused solutions to this as well (e.g. brew, npm).