What if you don't need MCP at all?

What if you don't need MCP at all?

2025-11-02

One chonky MCP server

Table of contents

After months of agentic coding frenzy, Twitter is still ablaze with discussions about MCP servers. I previously did some very light benchmarking to see if Bash tools or MCP servers are better suited for a specific task. The TL;DR: both can be efficient if you take care.

Unfortunately, many of the most popular MCP servers are inefficient for a specific task. They need to cover all bases, which means they provide large numbers of tools with lengthy descriptions, consuming significant context.

It's also hard to extend an existing MCP server. You could check out the source and modify it, but then you'd have to understand the codebase, together with your agent.

MCP servers also aren't composable. Results returned by an MCP server have to go through the agent's context to be persisted to disk or combined with other results.

I'm a simple boy, so I like simple things. Agents can run Bash and write code well. Bash and code are composable. So what's simpler than having your agent just invoke CLI tools and write code? This is nothing new. We've all been doing this since the beginning. I'd just like to convince you that in many situations, you don't need or even want an MCP server.

Let me illustrate this with a common MCP server use case: browser dev tools.

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