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.
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
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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?
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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
all you need is a simple skills.md and maybe a couple examples and codex picks up my custom toolkit and uses it.
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