[felipeerias]

In your example, you could achieve a similar outcome with a skill that included a custom command-line tool and a brief description of how to use it.

MCPs are specially well suited for cases that need a permanent instance running alongside the coding agent, for example to handle authentication or some long-lived service that is too cumbersome to launch every time the tool is called.

[prescriptivist]

I mention mean-time to decision making and that's one of the rationales for the mcp. A skill could call a script that does the same thing -- but at that point aren't we just splitting hairs? We are both talking about automated repetitive thinking + actions that the agent takes? And if the skill requires authentication, you have to encode passing that auth into the prompt. MCP servers can just read tokens from the filesystem at call time and don't require thinking at all.