[drdrey]

this seems like what MCPs should have been from the beginning. If you think MCPs are better, can you explain why?

[storystarling]

I suspect the main trade-off is structured data versus text parsing. While CLIs are composable, relying on stdout is brittle for anything complex. MCP enforces a schema (types), which acts as a contract between the model and your backend. If you're building reliable pipelines rather than just one-off scripts, that structure is pretty critical to avoid parsing errors downstream.