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Comment by tedk-42 | Hacker News Reader

Haha in the world of AI/MCPs, all of a sudden we have a push for companies to properly build out APIs/CLI tools.

I have always said that if we had done for developers what we are doing for agents the whole world would have been a much better place.

Perhaps we will finally emerge from this decades-long dark age of bloated, do-everything GUI development tools being the fashionable happy path.

The AWS cli tool wants to have a talk… hard to find a more bloated mess of strung together scripts held together by tape.

I think all the SDKs and the cli tool itself are mostly code generated.

Even if the AI bubble bursts hard, we'll still have all of the better tooling for us actual humans.

But saying "it's for AI" is a corporate life hack for you to get permission to build said better tooling... =)

One of the very few good things from the AI race has been everyone finally publishing more data APIs out in the open, and making their tools usable via CLIs (or extensible APIs).

I feel like the CLI craze started around 2020. That predates this chat GPT.

CharmCLI golang

Nushell rust

Warp. Shell

Were all around 2020 also that is when alt shells started getting popular probably for same reasons they still are.

About 90% of “make codebase better for LLMs” is just good old fashioned better engineering that is also good for humans.

They aren't doing that though. At least not yet. It's generated from the discovery tool, which amounts to the spec of the existing API. If they want a high powered CLI they need to dig into the servers behind Google Workspace like they have when they've improved the web apps.

But on the other hand a (possibly dark) pattern is emerging where companies are asking you to upgrade to a higher plan to access MCP.

I noted something similar a few weeks ago. Companies are finally putting APIs in front of things that should have had APIs for years!

yeah there's way more demand, and at the same time, it's way easier for the company to build and maintain (with the help of AI). Great to see!

Took them this long to realize MCPs are just worse APIs.

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