MCP vs CLI: Benchmarking Tools for Coding Agents

My takeaway? Maybe instead of arguing about MCP vs CLI, we should start building better tools. The protocol is just plumbing. What matters is whether your tool helps or hinders the agent's ability to complete tasks.

That said, if you're building a tool from scratch and your users already have a shell tool available, just make a good CLI. It's simpler and more portable. Plus, the output of your CLI can be further filtered and massaged just by piping it into another CLI tool, which can increase token efficiency at the cost of additional instructions. That's not possible with MCPs.

Once you have a well-designed, token-efficient CLI tool, adding an MCP server on top of it is very straightforward.