I was looking at adding MCP support to a couple apps because I like playing with IPC/XPC. Worried about it causing slop to get added here and it kind of feels like something that should be part of shortcuts.
@paul no need for MCP when you have a command line interface that prints usage!

@stroughtonsmith @paul Yeah. A lot of people have moved away from MCP to Skills w/CLI tools (either installed or bundled).

MCP pollutes the context window a fair bit, even when they're not being used.

@stroughtonsmith I guess but feels like more of hack vs MCP, don't want to launch the app twice/multiple times.

@paul @stroughtonsmith There’s that whole thing about someone implementing an MCP for @NetNewsWire via AppleScript.

So… AppleScript, ???, profit?

@paul @stroughtonsmith MCP is very much a hack. Plenty of research shows CLI tools are more effective and use up less context
@stroughtonsmith @paul Perhaps one of the best things about the AI era is all these companies scrambling to finally build the CLIs to their services so we don't have to use their awful websites
@paul I’ve used the shortcuts CLI to interact with some apps from my AI Agent of choice. That flow works oretty well as a skill and I can use all the other deterministic functionality from shortcuts which is handy.