I’m going to make a bold claim: MCP is already dying. We may not fully realize it yet, but the signs are there. OpenClaw doesn’t support it. Pi doesn’t support it. And for good reason.
When Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol, the industry collectively lost its mind. Every company scrambled to ship MCP servers as proof they were “AI first.” Massive resources poured into new endpoints, new wire formats, new authorization schemes, all so LLMs could talk to services they could already talk to.
I’ll admit, I never fully understood the need for it. You know what LLMs are really good at? Figuring things out on their own. Give them a CLI and some docs and they’re off to the races.
I tried to avoid writing this for a long time, but I’m convinced MCP provides no real-world benefit, and that we’d be better off without it. Let me explain.
LLMs don’t need a special protocol
LLMs are really good at using command-line tools. They’ve been trained on millions of man pages, Stack Overflow answers, and GitHub repos full of shell scripts. When I tell Claude to use gh pr view 123 , it just works.
MCP promised a cleaner interface, but in practice I found myself writing the same documentation anyway: what each tool does, what parameters it accepts, and more importantly, when to use it. The LLM didn’t need a new protocol.
CLIs are for humans too
When Claude does something unexpected with Jira, I can run the same jira issue view command and see exactly what it saw. Same input, same output, no mystery.
With MCP, the tool only exists inside the LLM conversation. Something goes wrong and now I’m spelunking through JSON transport logs instead of just running the command myself. Debugging shouldn’t require a protocol decoder.
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