MCP doesn’t suck — your agent does

Official Schedule Context

Official Description

Most AI agents misuse MCP and treat tools as prompt-time function calls: tool definitions and

results are repeatedly injected into the context, tokens are wasted, and context rots. The result?

Slower, less reliable agents, and the misleading conclusion that “MCP sucks, CLIs are better.” To

challenge this narrative and show how agents can get the best of both MCP and CLI, at

https://apify.com/ we’ve built mcpc (https://github.com/apify/mcpc), an open-source universal CLI

client for MCP. It maps MCP operations to intuitive CLI commands, which agents quickly pick up

through --help without external skills. It turns out, CLI is the perfect local interface for agents

to interact with MCP, giving them access to full protocol capabilities including modern features

like code mode or progressive tool discovery through a single Bash() tool call, while leveraging

MCP’s standard remote interface for server discovery, authentication, payments, and access control.

To once and for all kill the MCP vs. CLI debate and show those two technologies are not exclusive

but complementary, we’ll present evals comparing performance of agents using naive MCP, modern MCP,

native CLIs, other MCP CLIs, and mcpc, in various real-world scenarios.

Related YouTube Video

The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

Transcript Status

Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

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