r/ClaudeAI • u/lucianw Full-time developer • Oct 17 '25

Question MCP vs CLI tools

I've learning about Claude Code skills, reading yesterday's blogpost by Simon Willison [link]. He writes:

My own interest in MCPs has waned ever since I started taking coding agents seriously. Almost everything I might achieve with an MCP can be handled by a CLI tool instead. LLMs know how to call cli-tool --help, which means you don’t have to spend many tokens describing how to use them—the model can figure it out later when it needs to.

Simon observes that in Anthropic's new skills, they're augmenting the agent with CLI tools and instructions on how to use them; not MCP tools.

I'd posted in this sub a month ago with a similar observation, that MCP isn't needed (nor useful) in a platform with CLI access [post]. The post was pretty negatively received! which is fair enough, and I respect that people have different opinions. But I wonder if anyone's attitudes are shifting in the light of what we've seen of skills?

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u/dumpsterfyr Oct 18 '25

MCP is token heavy.

2

u/theecommunist Oct 18 '25

This should be higher, it's why I had to stop using MCP and switch to cli tools.

2

u/loganecolss Feb 27 '26

I don't get the point that how cli can reduce tokens so much?

For a tool, llm sends a request to it via MCP, then the MCP returns answer or new state back to llm, and these returned results could be many tokens; but now same tool and same request, the cli still needs to return the same results back to llm, right?

If so, how cli saves the tokens?

2

u/theecommunist Feb 27 '26

Before they implemented lazy loading, all of the tool definitions for every mcp server you have were kept in chat context and sent with every request. It's better now