thellimist

From use case point of view

skills are unstructured. MCP is structured.

You don't want stripe skill. You want stripe MCP of CLI to interact with. When stripe does an update you want to have it.

I didn't go into technical details or anything. Just laid the most important use case that skills cannot be sufficient

Does anyone else similar outputs?

fixed - github.com/thellimist/clihub

If you read my posts before 2023, it's same style.

I guess my thinking way is similar to LLMs, has clear structure.

I used to have more grammar issues, that LLMs fix, but the high level outline etc. are actually how I think about it. If it's not, I modify it

Rust doesn't compile different machines well. So choose Go

I did - I have my almost a dozen CLIs that are custom built that I'm using. Very reliable.

It still needs to do discovery (--help etc.), always gets the job done

did you check the token usage comparison between cmcp and cli?

This is cool!

I was actually thinking if I should support daemons just to support playwright. Now I don't have a use case for it

FYI the blog has direct comparison to Anthropic’s Tool Search.

Regardless, most MCPs are dumping. I know Cloudflare MCP is amazing but other 1000 useful MCPs are not.

Ofc it is written by ai, I have a skill for it -

https://github.com/thellimist/thellimist.github.io/blob/mast...

https://github.com/thellimist/thellimist.github.io/blob/mast...

I dump a voice message, then blog comes out. Then I modify a bunch of things, and iterate 1-2 hours to get it right

I actually want to combine this and CLIHub into a directory where someone can download all the official MCPs or CLIs (or MCP to CLIs) with a single command

I don't prefer to use online skills where half has malware

Official MCPs are trusted. Official MCPs CLIs are trusted.

I was happy with playwright like MCPs that require the daemon so didn't convert them to CLIs.

My use cases are almost all 3rd party integrations.

Have you seen any improvements converting on MCPs that require persistency into CLI?

Nice!

Compared both

---

TL;DR CLIHUB compiles MCP servers into portable, self-contained binaries — think of it like a compiler. Best for distribution, CI, and environments where you can't run a daemon.

mcpshim is a runtime bridge — think of it like a local proxy. Best for developers juggling many MCP servers locally, especially when paired with LLM agents that benefit from persistent connections and lightweight aliases.

---

https://cdn.zappy.app/b908e63a442179801e406b01cf412433.png (table comparison)

---

What do you mean?

Main differences are

CLIHub

- written in go

- zero-dependency binaries

- cross-compilation built-in (works on all platforms)

- supports OAuth2 w/ PKCE, S2S, Google SA, API key, basic, bearer. Can be extended further

MCPorter

- TS

- huge dependency list

- runtime dependency on bun

- Auth supports OAuth + basic token

- Has many features like SDK, daemons (for certain MCPs), auto config discovery etc.

MCPorter is more complete tbh. Has many nice to have features for advanced use cases.

My use case is simple. Does it generate a CLI that works? Mainly oauth is the blocker since that logic needs to be custom implemented to the CLI.

Good catch.

I didn't release the website yet. I'll remove the link

personal experience, definitely yes. You can try it out with `gh` rather than `Github MCP`. You'll see the difference immediately (espicially more if you have many MCPs)

I can give example.

LLM only know `linear` tool exists.

I ask "get me the comments in the last issue"

Next call LLM does is

`linear --help 2>&1 | grep -i -E "search|list.issue|get.issue")` then `linear list-issues --raw '{"limit": 3}' -o json 2>&1 | head -80)` then `linear list-comments --issue-id "abc1ceae-aaaa-bbbb-9aaa-6bef0325ebd0" 2>&1)`

So even the --help has filtering by default. Current models are pretty good

It's the same from functionality perspective. The schema's are converted to CLI versions of it. It's a UI change more than anything.

For humans - more documentation is bad. Simple documentation is generally better. For AI - what type of documentation is better? Is code + RAG sufficient? Do we need more text format summaries?

What is the purpose of this particular approach?

Haystack (YC W21) | Remote | Full-time | usehaystack.io Haystack helps dev teams get incredibly good at delivering software. We do that using analytics and alerts pulled straight from Github.

Haystack is a fast growing early startup. From 0 to 1.5 years companies like Microsoft, The Economist, Cameo, Indiegogo and many more are using Haystack daily!

We are looking for:

* Full Stack Engineer: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/znulCUM-...

* Account Executive: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/40uM4uM-...

Haystack (YC W21) | Remote | Full-time | usehaystack.io

Haystack helps dev teams get incredibly good at delivering software. We do that using analytics and alerts pulled straight from Github.

Haystack is a fast growing early startup. From 0 to 1.5 years companies like Microsoft, The Economist, Cameo, Indiegogo and many more are using Haystack daily!

We are looking for:

* Full Stack Engineer: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/znulCUM-....

* Account Executive: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/40uM4uM-...

Interested? Please send me an email at kan@usehaystack.io

Haystack (YC W21) | Remote | Full-time | usehaystack.io

Haystack helps dev teams get incredibly good at delivering software. We do that using analytics and alerts pulled straight from Github.

Haystack is a fast growing early startup. From 0 to 1.5 years companies like Microsoft, The Economist, Cameo, Indiegogo and many more are using Haystack daily!

We are looking for:

* Full Stack Engineer: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/znulCUM-...

* Sr. Sales Executive: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/haystack/jobs/40uM4uM-...

Interested? Please send me an email at kan@usehaystack.io

Your marketing demo had a facebook ads source but when I installed the add-on, I couldn't find a way to connect my own facebook ads account anywhere. How can I do this?

I love the concept! Is there a defined curriculum that you want to tackle?

Awesome list! Great work

Being able to read code from similar projects in Github.

It allows you to do better design, learn how to write readable code, and allow you to move faster.

The product focuses on giving visibility by visualizing trends, identifing blockers and optimizing code reviews.

As long as the team has a visibility problem Haystack should be beneficial.

We have organizations prefering to use the stats more privately and only mention the necessary stats to engineers. We also have organization using our product in their daily standups. It depends on how the team choses to use it. We have seen both styles work well.

In the book you can check the sections Avoid Burnout: Work Overload and Overload Risk: Too Much Concurrent Work.

We get 6 months weekly average pull request throughput of each team. We call this the "Baseline Throghput". If a team has more (or less in some cases) pull requests open than the baseline, we consider that a "too many".

Too many Open Pull Requests can signal taking on too much work, scope creep, change in priorities and unexpected issues/bugs coming into the sprint. It’s good to keep an eye out of the number of Open Pull Requests since it’s a great indicator of the team’s current workload.