Nolan LawsonMar 2

"MCP is dead. Long live the CLI" by Eric Holmes https://ejholmes.github.io/2026/02/28/mcp-is-dead-long-live-the-cli.html

I never understood the mania around MCP – it always seemed like a way-too-complex solution to the problem. Maybe we will eventually just land on skills and CLIs (or maybe just CLIs!).

MCP is dead. Long live the CLI

Show threadNolan Lawson
Ultimately if you have a list of CLIs, and if each of those CLIs supports `--help`, then… do you even need the concept of a "skill"?
Mar 2 at 4:36amWeb
Show threadyoshMar 2

@nolan I do feel like the current wave of tools heavily underestimate the importance of sandboxing and compartmentalization.

I dont just want a session to be isolated in its entirety. I want individual tools to be isolated *from each other*. Not that MCP necessarily does this well, but it's more amenable to it than bare CLI tools are.

Show threadmoopetMar 2
@nolan I get the impression that MCP wants to make the one single Theory Of Everything interface so eventually humans will be out of the loop entirely. Why support humans when it can all be done in code? There's no point in having `az login` if you're no longer using it.
Show threadJed SchmidtMar 2
@nolan indeed, smelled a lot like SOAP.