CLIs vs MCP: What Agents Actually Need

🔧 CLIs

Token-efficient — lean output, no bloat
50 years of proof — grep, jq, gh, git
Composable — pipes, chaining
Universal — every agent can shell out

🔌 MCP

Structured output — typed, no parsing
Discovery — servers advertise tools
Cross-client — one server, many agents
OAuth scopes — remote auth + audit

Patrick Eden "Nobody's asking the designer who just wants to pull Figma components whether she wants to learn bash."

Den Delimarsky (MCP maintainer) "MCP is the USB-C for LLMs — not technically superior to every cable, but universal."

The designer talks to the agent. The agent calls grep. She never sees it.

🔓 Real attack — March 2026 "The attacker got the npm token by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed." — 268K views

CLIs for local. MCP for remote. Governance for both.

The real question isn't CLI vs MCP — it's who governs 50 agents × 200 tools. That's ODR.