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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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mattmanser·

Honest question, as your comment confuses me.

Did you get to the part where he said MCP is pointless and are saying he's wrong?

Or did you just read the start of the article and not get to that bit?

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I'd second the article on this, but also add to it that the biggest reason MCP servers don't really matter much any more is that the models are so capable of working with APIs, that most of the time you can just point them at an API and give them a spec instead. And the times that doesn't work, just give them a CLI tool with a good --help option.

Now you have a CLI tool you can use yourself, and the agent has a tool to use.

Anthropic itself have made MCP server increasingly pointless: With agents + skills you have a more composeable model that can use the model capabilities to do all an MCP server can with or without CLI tools to augment them.

I feel the CLI vs MCP debate is an apples to oranges framing. When you're using claude you can watch it using CLI's, running brew, mise, lots of jq but what about when you've built an agent that needs to work through a complicated API? You don't want to make 5 CRUD calls to get the right answer. A curated MCP tool ensures it can determinism where it matters most.. when interacting with customer data

Sounds more like a problem with your APIs trying to follow some REST 'purity' rather than be usable.

Even in the case where you need to group steps together in a deterministic manner, you don't need an MCP server for that. You just need to bundle those steps into a CLI or API endpoint.

That was my point. Going the extra step and wrapping it in an MCP provides minimal advantage vs. just writing a SKILL.md for a CLI or API endpoint.

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