> Why would you favor this approach over say, a command line tool that can pipe input into and out of a configurable AI backend, fork subprocesses [...]

I think what you're describing is something that's built to perform agent based tasks. iterm-mcp isn't intended to be that. It's intended to be a bridge from something like Claude Desktop to iTerm. The REPL use case is a key thing to understand here.

What you're describing is great if you want to delegate "install python on my system" for example, but it doesn't support the REPL use case where you want to work with the REPL through something like Claude Desktop.

The other key use case iterm-mcp addresses is asking questions about what's sitting in the terminal right now. For example, you ran `brew install ffmpeg` and something didn't work: you can ask Claude using iterm-mcp.

> This tool seems like it locks you into iTerm2.

This tool is intended for use with iTerm2. It's not that it "locks you into iTerm2" - iterm-mcp is something that you would choose to use if you already use iTerm2.