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mmaunder | on: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful. So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it. Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know. Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in. Playwright with headless Chromium or headed chrome is what anyone serious is using and we get all the dev and inspection tools already. And it works perfectly. This only has appeal to those starting out and confused into thinking this is the way. The answer is almost never MCP.
zeroxfe | parent | next
> Also MCP is very obviously dead, as any of us doing heavy agentic coding know.

As someone that does heavy agentic coding (using basically all the tools), this is so far from the truth. People claiming this have probably never worked in large enterprise environments where things like authentication, RBAC, rate limiting, abuse detection, centralized management/updates/ops, etc. are a huge part of the development and deployment workflow.

In these situations you can't just use skills and cli tools without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased operational and security complexity. MCP is really useful here, and allows centralized eng and ops teams to manage their services in a way that aligns with the organizations overall posture, policies, and infrastructure.

> Google is so far behind agentic cli coding. Gemini CLI is awful.

This part I totally agree. It's really hard to express how bad it is (and it's really disappointing.)

bloppe | root | parent | next
> you can't just use skills and cli tools without a gigantic amount of retooling and increased operational and security complexity

You're describing MCP. After all, MCP is just reinventing the OpenAPI wheel. You can just have a self-documenting REST API using OpenAPI. Put the spec in your context and your model knows how to use it. You can have all the RBAC and rate limiting and auth you want. Heck, you could even build all that complexity into a CLI tool if you want. MCP the protocol doesn't actually enable anything. And implementing an MCP server is exactly as complex as using any other established protocol if you're using all those features anyway

whattheheckheck | root | parent
The clients for mcp can drop a url and http in the mcp.json and get access to the application. Can the client do that for every rest api?
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moritonal | root | parent
Given MCP is supposed to just be a standardised format for self-describing APIs, why are all the features you listed MCP related things? It sounds more like it's forced the enterprise to build such features which cli tooling didn't have?
rsalus | root | parent | next
mostly by virtue of being a common standard. MCP servers are primarily useful in a remote environment, where centralized management of cross-cutting concerns matters. also its really useful for integrating existing distributed services, e.g., internal data lakes.

I think it's clear a self-describing CLI is optimal for local-first tooling and portability. I personally view remote MCP servers as complementary in the space.

tomnipotent | root | parent
MCP's can hide most things behind an API.
IX-103 | parent | next
FYI: Gemini Cli is used internally at Google. It's actually more popular than Antigravity. Google uses MCP services internally for code search (since everything is in a mono-repo you don't want to waste time grepping billions of files), accessing docs and bugs, and also accessing project specific RAG databases for expertise grounding.

Source - I know people at Google.

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cheema33 | parent | next
> Also MCP is very obviously dead

Some people will push back on this. They are holding out hope that the recent improvements Anthropic has made in this regard have improved the context rot problem with MCP. Anthropic's changes improve things a little. But it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.

The reason MCP is dying/dead is because MCP servers, once configured, bloat up context even when they are not being used. Why would anybody want that?

Use agent skills. And say goodbye to MCP. We need to move on from MCP.

maxwellg | root | parent | next
Is your agent harness dropping the entire MCP server tool description output directly into the context window? Is your agent harness always addig MCP servers to the context even when they are not being used?

MCP is a wire format protocol between clients and servers. What ends up inside the context window is the agent builder's decision.

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ktoo_ | root | parent | next
> it is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. It helps, but not much.

The lipstick helps? This had me in stitches. Sorry for the non-additive reply. This is the funniest way I have seen this or any other phrase explained. By far. Honestly has made my day and set me up for the whole week.

dominotw | root | parent | next
i am using notion mcp. is there a corresponding skill. also wtf is a plugin.
Rapzid | root | parent
The bloat problem is already out dated though. People are having the LLM pick the MCP servers it needs for a particular task up front, or picking them out-of-band, so the full list doesn't exist in the context every call.
edwinjm | parent | next
MCP is dead? Which cli tool should we use to instruct Chrome to open a page and click the Open button? And to read what appears in the console after clicking?

MCP permanently sacrifice a chunk of the context window? And a skill for you cli is free?

rsalus | parent | next
MCP is very much not dead. centralized remote MCP servers are incredibly useful. also bespoke CLIs still require guidance for models to use effectively, so it's clear that token efficiency is still an issue regardless.
Torn | root | parent | next
Tbh I find self-documenting CLIs (e.g. with a `--help` flag, and printing correct usage examples when LLMs make things up) plus a skill that's auto invoked to be pretty reliable. CLIs can do OAuth dances too just fine.

MCP's remaining moats I think are:

- No-install product integrations (just paste in mcp config into app)

- Non-developer end users / no shell needed (no terminal)

- Multi-tenant auth (many users, dynamic OAuth)

- Security sandboxing (restrict what agents can do), credential sandboxing (agents never see secrets)

- Compliance/audit (structured logs, schema enforcement)?

If you're a developer building for developers though, CLI seems to be a clear winner right

quotemstr | root | parent
Imagine if, in addition to local MCP "servers", the MCP people had nurtured a structured CLI-based --help-equivalent consumable by LLMs and shell completion engines alike. Doing so, you unify "CLI" (trivial deployment; human accessibility) and MCP-style (structured and discoverable tool calling) in a single DWIM artifact.

But since when has this industry done the right thing informed by wisdom and hindsight?

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abhis3798 | root | parent | next
I see remote MCP servers as a great interface to consume api responses. The idea that you essentially make your apis easily available to agents to bring in relevant context is a powerful one.

When folks say MCP is dead, I don't get it. What other alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?

attentive | root | parent
> What other alternatives exist in place of MCP? Arbitrary code via curl/sdks to call a remote endpoint?

cli?

for example aws cli. It's a full interface to aws API. Why would you need mcp for that?

and if you have any doubts, agents use it with a great effect even without any relevant skill. "aws help" is fully discoverable.

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mattnewton | root | parent | next
I think cli’s are more token efficient- the help menu is loaded only when needed, and the output is trivially pipe able to grep or jq to filter out what the model actually wants
nojito | root | parent
all you need is a simple skills.md and maybe a couple examples and codex picks up my custom toolkit and uses it.
dominotw | root | parent
whats your custom toolkit
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sega_sai | parent | next
I don't know if this just anecdotal random impression, but in a last week or two I had mostly good experience with Google cli. While previously I constantly complained about it. I have been using it together with codex, and I would not say that one is much better than another.

It is hard to say nowadays, when things change so quickly

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girvo | parent | next
I know it’s a bit of a tangent but man you’re right re. Gemini CLI. It’s woefully bad, barely works. Maybe because I was a “free” user trying it out at the time, but it was such a bad experience it turned me off subscribing to whatever their coding plan is called today.
ElCapitanMarkla | root | parent | next
I had this exp too, but I trialed the pro sub a few weeks back and it has been great. I have no complaints this time
luckydata | root | parent
it's not the CLI, it's the model. The model wasn't trained to do that kind of work, was trained to do one shot coding, not sustained back and forth until it gets it right like Claude and ChatGPT.
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hu3 | parent | next
> Also MCP is very obviously dead...

Couldn't have been more wrong. MCP despite its manageable downsides is leagues ahead of anything else in many ways.

The fact that SoTA models are trained to handle MCP should be hint enough to the observant.

I probably build one MCP tool per week at work.

And every project I work on gets its own MCP tool too. It's invaluable to have specialized per-project tooling instead of a bunch of heterogeneous scripts+glue+prayer.

Anything specialized goes into an MCP.

synalx | parent | next
Antigravity's coding agent is worlds apart from Gemini CLI, though.
danpalmer | parent | next
> So bad in fact that it’s clear none of their team use it.

I use it extensively, many of my colleagues do. I get a ton of value out of it. Some prefer Antigravity, but I prefer Gemini CLI. I get fairly long trajectories out of it, and some of my colleagues are getting day-long trajectories out of it. It has improved massively since I started using it when it first came out.

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hugs | parent | next
some serious people use vibium instead. (full-disclosure: "some serious people" is me.)
spiderfarmer | parent | next
MCP is not just used for coding.
quotemstr | parent
> Why permanently sacrifice that chunk of your context window when you can just use CLI tools which are also faster and more flexible and many are already trained in

What about all the CLI tools not baked into the model's priors?

Every time someone says "extensibility mechanism X is dead!", I think "Well, I guess that guy isn't doing anything that needs to extend the statistical average of 2010s-era Reddit"