Everyone Scrambled to Ship MCP Servers. The Agents That Actually Work Just Use the Command Line.

TL;DR: CLI tools are more reliable and effective for tasks involving servers, code, and infrastructure. MCP protocols may fit specific cases around web automation but aren't ready for prime time yet. Flexibility is key: choose tools based on what works best for your use case. Everyone scrambled to ship MCP servers when Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol. The industry rushed to prove they were "AI first," but the cracks are beginning to show. Check out the blog post “MCP is dead. Long live the CLI” that blew up on Hacker News. It's clear the excitement is turning into skepticism, especially with Google quietly launching WebMCP, a totally different direction for how agents interact with the web. The Case for the CLI Here’s the deal: LLMs already know how to use command-line tools. They’ve been trained on countless man pages and shell scripts. So when you tell an agent to run gh pr view 123 , it just works. No special protocols or debugging at 2 AM required. Eric Holmes hit th