People make the argument that it doesn't matter for non-programmers. I use Bluebeam (a pdf editor which is standard in the construction industry) daily, and it has an MCP, but a big problem is that if the agent wants to import or export a large amount of data from a document, then it has to regurgitate a bunch of tokens into or out of the MCP. If it were a CLI, then it would just pipe things in and out as it needs.
I ended up just having the agent make a script that wraps the MCP so it can use it as a CLI instead.
MCP has its place. It should not be the default for many use cases, but if you need to expose specific tools in a secure way to agents that are not trusted to run shell commands then MCP is great. Developers need to think beyond their own use cases and consider architecture patterns if they're going to build, not just consume, AI systems.
This was just to avoid MCP infra, but the newer stateless protocol makes that much more trivial.
It is the same with a wepapp: You could argue you don't neex browser apps if the user just install a software on their computer, but we feel better using the sandboxing environment of your browser.
Be surprised how far apps can get with just solid & well documented APIs. Modern agents are smart!
Then you don't need an MCP server per service anymore, you just need one and a whitelist of authorized services.