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by orange_joe 105 days ago
This doesn't really pay attention to token costs. If I'm making a series of statically dependent calls I want to avoid blowing up the context with information on the intermediary states. Also, I don't really want to send my users skill.md files on how to do X,Y & Z.
2 comments
krzyk 105 days ago
Why? MCP and CLI is similar here.

You need agent to find MCP and what it can be used for (context), similarly you can write what CLI use for e.g. jira.

Rest is up to agent, it needs to list what it can do in MCP, similarly CLI with proper help text will list that.

Regarding context those tools are exactly the same.

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lmeyerov 105 days ago
This feels right in theory and wrong in practice

When measuring speed running blue team CTFs ("Breaking BOTS" talk at Chaos Congress), I saw about a ~2x difference in speed (~= tokens) for a database usage between curl (~skills) vs mcp (~python). In theory you can rewrite the mcp into the skill as .md/.py, but at that point ... .

Also I think some people are talking past one another in these discussions. The skill format is a folder that supports dropping in code files, so much of what MCP does can be copy-pasted into that. However, many people discussing skills mean markdown-only and letting the LLM do the rest, which would require a fancy bootstrapping period to make as smooth as the code version. I'd agree that skills, when a folder coming with code, does feel like largely obviating MCPs for solo use cases, until you consider remote MCPs & OAuth, which seem unaddressed and core in practice for wider use.

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phpnode 105 days ago
the article only makes sense if you think that only developers use AI tools, and that the discovery / setup problem doesn't matter
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trollbridge 105 days ago
But that's the current primary use case for AI. We aren't anywhere close to being able to sanitise input from hostile third parties enough to just let people start inputting prompts to my own system.
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phpnode 105 days ago
there's a whole world of AI tools out there that don't focus on developers. These tools often need to interact with external services in one way or another, and MCP gives those less technical users an easy way to connect e.g. Notion or Linear in a couple of clicks, with auth taken care of automatically. CLIs are never replacing that use case.
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