Hacker News Reader

Is there any redeeming quality of MCP vs a skill with CLI tool? Right now it looks like the latter is a clear winner.

Maybe MCP can help segregate auto-approve vs ask more cleanly, but I don't actually see that being done.

MCP defines a consistent authentication protocol. This is the real issue with CLIs, each CLI can (and will) have a different way of handling authentication (env variables, config set, JSON, yml, etc).

But tbh there's no reason agents can't abstract this out. As long as a CLI has a --help or similar (which 99% do) with a description of how to login, then it can figure it out for you. This does take context and tool calls though so not hugely efficient.

That's fair. I just really don't like the way MCP gives the tool author control of my context. It's worth setting up some env vars and config files to avoid them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com