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.)
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