[MatthewPhillips]

Please keep in mind that CLIs do not run on mobile and never will. This is the elephant in the room that nearly everypne seems to be ignoring. This "debate" is built around the assumption that AI is only for at-your-desk work. It's obviously not. Having the ability to mix/match the services you use for everything in your life, whether that's email or social networks or managing your book collection, is going to be a normal thing everyone does in the future. It's just not today, because AI companies are almost exclusively focused on the programming use-case (and related desk job stuff).

[mhalle]

CLIs do work on mobile when they are packaged in skills that run in an appropriate VM behind the LLM.

Claude on the web does this. The only issue is controlling network access, which could be fixed by per-skill ACLs.

[MatthewPhillips]

Walk me through how a user installs and then uses these CLIs from their mobile phone.

[mhalle]

Create a skill that has the CLI in the scripts sub-directory. The implementation language depends on the LLM and the VM it uses. Claude includes shell, python, and a bunch of other interpreters in a Linux environment.

A skill's instructions can direct the LLM to call the CLI.

Claude skills can be installed into Claude web from a web browser. Those skills can then run on the Claude app on your phone.

[MatthewPhillips]

Ok, I can see there's a new (to me) Customize section where you can install skills. You have been able to connect MCP servers for quite a while.

The UX here isn't great, but let's assume it can be improved. How would auth work with this alternative method? I want to connect to Puma store and that's done using a skill with a CLI. Can the CLI launch your web browser to do oauth from the skill (on a phone)? And then the credentials are saved where?

Not challenging you, I'm open to alternatives to MCP for sure. But MCP seems way more mature especially for non-programming use-cases.

[falcor84]

> CLIs do not run on mobile and never will

Can you clarify why the never? What's the issue with giving a phone-based AI a sandboxed file system and bash shell?

[MatthewPhillips]

How is the user installing the CLIs? Proprietary app store for each chat app?

[falcor84]

I didn't mean that users would install them. I meant that if mcp and AI agents continue being popular, then Google and Apple could choose to provide apps with cli sandboxes with the proper permissions. It is a big change, but I just didn't understand the "never"; we've had bigger changes.

[MatthewPhillips]

Ok sure, the "never" was a bit strong here. Running CLIs on phones is not a normal thing and not as simple as it is on desktop. Apple prohibits apps from downloading and executing code, so some sort of new Apple-approved thing would be required here. That's a very heavy lift.

Of course anything is possible, I just don't think that people advocating for MCP's death have really thought through these problems, and are mostly focused on the desktop productivity use-cases.