People are saying API are better than MCP. But MCP is just API with some instructions for the AI to discover how to use it. Nothing more nothing less. And some people are saying we should use 'CLI'... what does it even mean? LLMs are good with common CLI tools like ffmpeg because the knowledge is solidified inside the weights. If I make a new CLI tool I still need to somehow teach the AI to use it. If one wants the 'teaching' part comes from a server then MCP. If one wants it local and static then skills. How could there be so many debates around these simple concepts?
It all has some form of "the thing I'm doing is the future and everyone who doesn't join me will fall behind" energy that AI/NFT/blockchain/web3/etc. enthusiasts talk about when they're trying to sell you something or when they're trying to convince the world they really are the big money makers they claim to be.
The LLM isn't going to care about where the tokens it's inserting into the context window are coming from. For all it cares the data it's processing came in over fax and was read in with OCR.
cli’s also need to be documented and input/output typed.
its also extremly dsitributable by just pointing to an url.
cli’s are great because they are composable but i really got huge mileage out of mcps
'Skills' should all be based on MCP, they should load on demand, be very easily manageable and discoverable by humans and by AI, and then it would work
The scope was too narrow, given how it ended up being applied.
If they layer something on top of it, it may yet be revived.
The concept of 'mcp server' is a brittle abstraction that need not exist.
A 'skill' is utterly superior in every sense: a 'right sized abstraction for whatever it is you're trying to do' - that can include cli / rest - and other key bits of information.