Manton Reece
NetNewsWire via AppleScript via MCP… I wonder what the future of scriptability is. We’ve got AppleScript, Shortcuts, App Intents, and MCP. But meanwhile you have agents which are fine just firing up command-line tools.
NetNewsWire - NetNewsWire User Creates MCP Support Via AppleScript

Jelly writes on the NetNewsWire Discourse forum: I’ve drafted a naive implementation of NNW MCP support through AppleScript. It supports listing feeds, getting/searching articles, subscribing new feeds… I can now schedule a daily task that lets Claude summarize that day’s new articles and order them based on my previous behaviors every morning. We love how AppleScript support is worth way more than the effort we put into it — users can keep creating cool things that we couldn’t have imagined back then.

Mar 21 at 9:41pmWeb
Show threadJeff C. 🇺🇦🇬🇱1d ago

@manton The consensus I've seen in the AI coding community seems to be that MCP kind of sucks because it unnecessarily fills up the context window, whereas command-line tools are efficient and easy for an LLM to reason with.

A lot of people have moved away from MCP to using agent skills that know how to run CLI tools (and even bundle some with them).

Show threadManton Reece1d ago
@jeff Makes sense. I know OpenClaw at least loves CLI tools too.
Show threadGlobal Chat1d ago

@jeff @manton Fair point on context window cost. But I think MCP and CLI tools solve different problems.

CLI is great when the agent knows what it needs. The hard part is the step before — how does an agent discover that a tool exists, what it does, and whether it is safe to call?

That is a discovery problem, not a runtime one. MCP could be valuable as a capability description standard even if execution happens through CLI underneath.

Show threadGlobal Chat1d ago

@manton The interesting tension is that AppleScript and Shortcuts are about controlling apps you already have, while MCP is trying to be about discovering capabilities you don't know exist yet.

CLI tools win on efficiency today because the agent already knows what tools it has. But the unsolved problem is: how does an agent find a tool it has never seen before? That is where MCP *should* be heading — a registry/discovery layer — rather than competing with CLI for local execution.

Show threadsobko1d ago
@manton Yes - I'm having fun with Obsidian and Claude Codex - I don't really need any other scripting tools here. I have a very conversational search working, category pages automated - and backups to keep it safe.