I thought the concensus was slowly converging to using clear CLIs + skills (i.e. progressive disclosure) instead of MCPs to avoid the context pollution.
CLIs are working better with current harnesses in my experience, but no idea how I would ship them.
some folks go to the trouble of publishing with `brew`
then there's the old `curl -LsSf https://example.com/install.sh | sh`
For example, is a typical Google Drive user expected to install an official google drive CLI and a skill md file just to interact with Google Drive in the chatgpt app? That seems absurd, IMO. Clicking “install” via an MCP / Plugin marketplace and then logging in via Oauth is less confusing.
MCP is also way more convenient (as a user) if i’m interacting with an API that supports oauth anyway. I don’t need to generate an api key, install a binary, create an md file, etc. CLIs and skills are great too! But not always the best choice.
note: cli tools do auth too — gh and claude code itself have some of the nicest auth flows i've experienced