"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

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"?

@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.