total MCP victory, some quick misc thoughts about why MCP is so much better than CLIs:

- indexable tool catalog letting agents scale to unlimited tools
- no requirements to be running a full sandbox
- consistent auth across all MCPs rather than each CLI inventing its own auth
- multi account support for all MCPs unlike CLIs
- implementations like code mode let the model know what will be returned allowing for super efficient token usage unlike CLIs

the reasons it took this long for MCPs to finally have their moment is mostly due to bad MCP implementations in clients:
- you had to restart your whole client to use an mcp (no hot reloading)
- agents weren't as familiar with debugging mcps as they were CLIs, so it was a lot easier for people to get set up using them

but over the past year, things like codex and claude plugins have all been using MCP under the hood, i.e computer use is an MCP, i believe claude artifacts are an MCP app, just the silent steady adoption

there is still an element of MCPs that is 'this MCP could've been an OpenAPI spec' but that'll go away as things like triggers get more adoption

at the end of the day, what's important to realize is while yes there are these difference between CLIs / MCPs / etc they're all just different ways of doing tool calling, and you can do some combination of lazy loading, searchable tools, and filtering to build efficient harnesses