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Comment by acchow | Hacker News Reader

The "CLI crowd" is also primarily using LLMs on their own computer. Where they have their CLI tools.

This doesn't cover the case when you're talking to an LLM from web, or via Slack or Linear, etc. There, you will want MCP so the LLM can use services on your behalf as you. That's portability.

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Why can’t the LLM you’re talking to on the web have access to your CLI tools?

When you talk to an LLM on the web, the harnesses spin up a fresh environment (I would hope it’s a VM…) so that the LLM can do stuff like run arbitrary Python and Bash scripts to complete the task you asked it for.

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to customize this environment to add whatever CLI tools and credentials you need for the agent to act on your behalf.

The UX would be exactly the same.

Could be more expensive to provide a computing environment.

It can’t possibly be more expensive than doing equivalent work using context instead of RAM and inference instead of CPU.

Unless we’ve got the wrong balance of compute availability and inference availability right now, but I would expect the market to stabilize at some point.

Skills can provide CLI tools for LLMs running on the web. It works great (I use Claude).

Even on your own machine with CLI tools , you really think it’s a great idea to let the LLM use the CLI as if it were you, with all permissions you have without any way to differentiate between actions you have manually taken and those that the LLM did? I hope the answer is no and you sandbox the agent with its own permissions and user, but if you do that perhaps MCP does not look so bad anymore!?

Why would you let the llm use the CLI as you?

Because that is convenient and everyone does it??

Just give it a different user with different permissions if yoirewon Linux. This is half century old tech.

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