gmaysI still prefer MCP over skills
I could not agree any less with the author. I don’t want APIs, I want agents to use the same CLI tooling I already use that is locally available. If my agents are using CLI tooling anyways there is no need to add an extra layer via MCP.
I don’t want remote MCP calls, I don’t even want remote models but that’s cost prohibitive.
If I need to call an API, a skill with existing CLI tooling is more than capable.
I keep getting hung up on securely storing and using secrets with CLI vs MCP. With MCP, you can run the server before you run the agent, so the agent never even has the keys in its environment. That way. If the agent decides to install the wrong npm package that auto dumps every secret it can find, you are less likely to have it sitting around. I haven’t figured out a good way to guarantee that with CLIs.
And in a skill, I can store the secret in the skill itself, or a secure storage the skill accesses, and the agent never gets to see the secret.
Sure, if I want my agents to use naked curl on the CLI, they need to know secrets. But that's not how I build my tools.