If you’re using MCP in production, what are you using it for? What advantages have you found over a normal API or direct tool integration or just CLI?
Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production? (self)
198 pointsby sukit6 days ago200 comments
I’ve been following MCP since it first came out.
It got a lot of attention early on, but I haven’t come across many people using it in production.
I may simply have missed them.
Aldipower 5 days ago
We use MCP in production since March 26 for user-facing endurance sports analytics and planning that integrates directly with the MCP host, in this case the chat interfaces of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Perplexity.ai, Mistral, you name it. All of those let users add either custom MCP servers, which users can do with a simple explanation. To connect Claude for example: https://www.tredict.com/faq/connect-claude-web-with-tredict/
This way users can use Claude to create and push workouts with their Garmin devices based on a prior analysis.
We also have a ChatGPT App, which uses MCP in the background: https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugin_asdk_app_69aef5b699a08191...
The point here is, MCP is the backbone behind the product and enables regular users to do things without knowing anything about it.
The whole "is MCP useless?" discussion is totally pointless from a regular consumer-user perspective, they even do not know what MCP is sometimes. The Tredict ChatGPT App connects with one click and a simple oauth flow. That's it.
adityapatadia 5 days ago
This. We also thought MCP was useless, but now the workflows by ChatGPT and Claude are so good; it's as good as installing an app from the App Store. We launched MCP for our SaaS and immediately found users using it.
API and MCP all are just buzzwords for customers. What they care about is whether they can get tasks done in our SaaS using Claude or ChatGPT. If that happens, it's a success.
deadbabe 5 days ago
Do you not expose a standard REST api?
edgyquant 5 days ago
MCP is not just a rest api its a layer on top
allknowingfrog 5 days ago
A layer than honestly doesn't do much, as I understand it. What does MCP as a protocol actually solve? Is it more than a bandwagon?
woofcat 5 days ago
My company uses MCP in production to connect different AI products together that were developed by different teams. It makes the connections very easy, where a REST interface often has quirks and features that you have to understand.
allknowingfrog 5 days ago
That's fair. REST isn't much of a standard. MCP can be just as badly designed and documented as REST, but at least there's a standard for authenticating and listing the options. Reading through other top-level comments, this seems to be the theme. MCP usage is mostly driven by ease of connection.
KellyCriterion 5 days ago
Im not deep in there, but Id guess it offers some discovery mechanisms? (not sure if my understanding is correct)
saalweachter 5 days ago
Basically it's just bundling the API documentation into a standard format to plug into LLMs, if you're comfortable running prompt injection on yourself and downloading random text from random websites and telling your favorite LLM to use it to access your banking information.
bavell 5 days ago
It's a bit of a nothingburger IMO, but charitably you could think of it as a rest API + bundled agent instructions.
edgyquant 10 hours ago
It tells an agent what tools are available and the scenarios when they should be called. This does a ton of work when working with agents
adityapatadia 5 days ago
We do. MCP works on top of it.
I say MCP is just lightweight layer on top of REST and as long as it works for end users I don’t see any reason not to adopt it.
5ersi 5 days ago
MCPs are diminishing in value a bit, because AI Agents are getting smarter about using API/CLIs. For example, I use gh cli via Claude instead of their MCP, because I already had cli setup, so no need to use MCP.
MCPs can potentially have great value if they cross multiple sources and combine results. For example at work we use an in-house MCP for log/metrics search across five different (legacy) systems. It finds correlation across events in different system within minutes.
skerit 5 days ago
I use MCPs all the time, but just like in your case: they're my own MCP servers.
They do exactly what I want and how I want it. They expose just the information and the features I want the LLM to have. And just like in your case, it combines multiple sources of information into 1 response.
newman314 5 days ago
FWIW, it appears that using the gh cli is much more token efficient than MCP so that's a plus.
https://medium.com/@ravi.madabhushi/mcp-is-up-to-32-more-exp...
sammorrowdrums 5 days ago
I see benchmarks a lot working on this, and I honestly think there’s too many things to cover in this comment but:
- this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too
- even with the above, talks of the raw token count don’t consider that for very long trajectories the prompt cache amortises much of this cost, and a feature of MCP is you can also customise the tools to a select subset, and that’s powerful
- you can add tool confirmations for write/destructive actions trivially
- the old training data on CLIs is good but actually for new features the fact MCP advertises them is also a bonus, but that takes longer to see, MCP isn’t that old
There are many more aspects, but even with GitHub MCP, where the agent has a huge amount of pre-training on the CLI, there are still reasons why people use it extensively - you don’t hear it a lot here but suffice to say usage never stopped growing to this day.
I think if CLIs are working for you then good, I also like our cli and did some work on it too, like adding gh skill subcommand.
Do use what works, and measure and improve - but this article is not doing justice to the MCP server IMHO.
throwup238 5 days ago
> - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too
Is that why I have to constantly remind Claude and ChatGPT that they do have access to a Github plugin that can access my account, instead of trying and failing to use the gh cli?
gycom 5 days ago
"claude, stop shelling out to grep, your search tool uses ripgrep and it's faster."
dleech 5 days ago
0verload.net ... I am the Author if the tool. I cloned grep and hopped it up a with a bunch of globs and stuff only a bot can really use. You can version control directorys ...its not meant to replace git.. I wronte it for my self because I was tired of wishing it hadnt been a week since i checked into github. I have not have regression at all since I started using it ..its a godsend.it increases the effective context size by a huge ammount..if you learn to use it correctly you can have hundreds of megs of context without a problem and share it between agents. Additionally theres an edit monitor that throws every file and the diff for all the things the bots edit and you cvan scroll thru the sessions edits holding alt down and page thru the days code. ITs meant to be a pair programming tool to use with claude code. I have full mcp support but I also have a more powerful scripting language.mcp support is just part of the scripting language..so is rest..the whole thing is bot centric..I have guis for itm all but you can just tell the bots to o stuff ..I made the bot interfaces for everything and then the gui. Oh..it caches all the memory contexts and all the verson controlled filex in ram so grepping stuff in the source controlled folder is considerably faster..anwhere from hundreds to I have seen 6000+ times faster grep results not thru any sort of black magic..its just what happens when a custom written grep has a in ram
0x457 5 days ago
"claude: my harness tells me to use python's pathlib"
sammorrowdrums 5 days ago
Most likely, personally I have thoughts on tool search, I don’t believe it’s the final stop on the road to MCP progressive discovery, but it does have its uses. Especially for very large tool catalogues.
Expect more on this. We are looking at the problem.
kobalsky 5 days ago
MCP doesn't expose service credentials to the AI.
kaoD 5 days ago
I definitely think that's a bridge to gap, but MCP is not the answer. OSes currently lack the tools to do this properly, but I hope they will improve. Agents need more granular sandboxing in all areas.
manveerc 5 days ago
This is not true by default. There are plenty of poorly implemented MCP servers which do that. The MCP spec supports Oauth and intends to avoid that but it is not enforced.
tirpen 5 days ago
The main benefit of MCP today over just giving an agent a CLI is of course that you can be a lot more certain about what the agent can or can't do.
Yes, an agent with CLI access and access to making HTTPS calls is a lot more efficient for most tasks, but also a lot more unpredictable and with much higher blast radius if it starts misbehaving compared to one that only have access to exactly the tools and data sources you want it to use.
dmazzoni 5 days ago
In practice that’s a lot of the value MCPs are providing.
Technically it’d work just as well to have a thin API wrapper or cli tool the agent is allowed to access.
dominotw 5 days ago
gh cli prbly has a lot of training data so maybe not a fair comparison
nojito 5 days ago
No it's because any model can do gh --help
cli tools are a natural fit for llms.
dominotw 5 days ago
actually run it now and see it wont do the help command you are talking about
EyeEmOe 3 days ago
Agree with this.
MCP and RAG feel like the usual pattern of running a daemon 24/7 that balloons infrastructure spend. So uncivilized.
Any given REST API is a small model. A frontier or local model and modern harness can parse the already existing documentation for that REST API and invoke or generate a tool to use it.
apexchaos 2 days ago
there is a number of importance that MCP can provide you outside using API/CLIs. when integrating with external services and you want a deterministic layer for your agent that can scale independently as your agentic layer in complex system while providing functionality like prompts and static read-only resources that can in turn be used for context injection and optimization. you might want to use MCP when it is this but for local services with alot of dependency or you want to write alot of wiring code, you can settle for API/CLIs
MitziMoto 5 days ago
We use MCP in production for our customer facing voice agents. Our custom MCP server defines tools and resources that the voice agents need access to to interact with our customers. (E.g. scheduling appointments, checking order status, etc).
Now we can point any voice agent platform we choose -- eleven labs, vapi, pipecat, whatever -- at our custom MCP server and it instantly has an understanding of the tools available, their inputs, and how to use them.
Compared to the alternatives everyone on HN champions, like clis and APIs, this is a no brainer. I'm honestly not even sure what the realistic alternative would even be.
Am I supposed to package and distribute a cli to ElevenLabs and ask them to use it? Give them a full API spec to implement for me?
I give them an endpoint and credentials and their platform instantly knows how to talk to mine. No one at ElevenLabs knows or cares about our implementation details.
HN has trouble seeing past the "developer in a terminal coding with Claude Code" use case for using AI. Real production agents have use cases that are very different!
When you don't own every piece of an integration with another system, there needs to be a well defined standard. That's what MCP provides.
denkmoon 5 days ago
Excuse me for being dense but I'd love to know more, if you can share. So you offer a voice agent for checking appointments and orders and stuff, is that through your app or website or something? So you make a button in your app which says "talk to our AI", and you've got the button set up so that it can send the customer's input query, along with a bit of text saying "our MCP is here, use it to answer the query", to any one of the voice agent providers? then you get some audio data in return that you play to the user?
MitziMoto 5 days ago
We use a Twilio integration to make it work over a real phone line, but it could just as well be an app or websocket connection in a browser.
Voice transport medium aside, the actual use case is not quite what you described.
Companies like Eleven Labs and Vapi provide a full end to end voice agent platform. They handle the STT -> LLM -> TTS pipeline and infrastructure for voice agents. Think of a customer talking to a virtual receptionist to schedule an appointment.
On the ElevenLabs platform, you provide them a system prompt (or an entire workflow/graph of system prompts) that instruct the voice agent on how to talk to the customer, tone, guardrails, how to answer specific questions, etc.
At some point we need that LLM agent, running on an infrastructure we don't control, to talk to our "CRM" (for simplicity sake). Enter MCP.
The MCP server we build and host supplies the "tools", like list_appointments, schedule_appointment, cancel_appointment-- whatever they may be.
When eleven Labs voice agent connects, it sees all the tools available and can use them per the instructions in the system prompt.
jdironman 5 days ago
How is security handled in a situation like this? (I'll end up reading up on it). But I mean things like how does the API let a specific session with a specific user only surface information for that specific user from the available tooling?
cco 5 days ago
Not the poster, but working on this right now.
The current framework that solves this the best right now is FiPA.
Establish identity the same way we always have, AS defines the challenges, the client (voice agent in this case) goes and gets them. OAuth from there!
edgyquant 5 days ago
You first authenticate via the phone (you can run an initial api call on phone start,) save session credentials in state on 11labs side and can then pass them back to future tool calls. You can then authenticate via a passcode if you wish
denkmoon 4 days ago
cool, thanks :)
navigate8310 5 days ago
I OCR'd my Chinese textbooks and made a stateless MCP that allows me to ground my Chinese language studies according to the textbook only. With this I can start a quiz, understand differences between words that have similar meanings knowing no extra grammar is fed when reviewing. I specifically use it with glm 5.3 as it is the most language specific LLM that understands nuances.
Here's the repository: https://github.com/iodize6399/xuexi-keben
And here's the server itself: https://keben.555420.xyz
AtomicSaboteur 5 days ago
That's an awesome example! I'll definitely make use of your repo and idea for my German classes. Did you use a specific OCR method? I'm trying to get something better than tesseract :(
navigate8310 5 days ago
I used Mistral 3. It costed me literally pennies. My workflow was kinda rudimentary but it worked really well. I suggest take a look at this https://github.com/docling-project/docling as well.
cagz 5 days ago
Yes, quite a few uses in prod, main use case being abstracting API access for agents. In our case these are mostly in-house MCP servers, purpose built for the given agent.
Why MCP instead of CLI or agent accessing API directly?
Direct access (Curl/own small function): This requires agent to have full understanding of the API spec. Yes, context can be protected using progressive disclosure, but this essentially means agent needing to understand the API again and again, before every use in that context. Also, a typical API spec may or may not be agent-friendly. If there are nuances when calling an endpoint, where do we put these? Into OAS description? Works, but clunky.
CLI: It works beautifully, especially when a 3rd party CLI already exists for a complex backend. Assumes a well documented, agent friendly CLI, most CLIs are designed for human or CI/CD consumption. Talking about MCP taking up too much context, think about agent starting with my_cli --help, and going down through the switches and parameters one at a time to figure out how the CLI should be called. Less of a problem when calling a well know CLI (e.g. aws), but anything more niche (or custom) requires multiple turns to compose the final CLI command.
MCP: Has its issues, but offers an agent-native solution. Everything agent needs to know about a tool becomes available at once. In an enterprise environment MCPs can be served through an MCP Gateway, providing governance and permission management, this is quite contrast against running a CLI that requires agent to have execute permissions in its shell.
I must mention that we also utilise lazy-loading of MCPs. In use cases where 10s of tools needs to be loaded, only the most common ones are pre-loaded, then agent kernel connects the others as an when needed, and release them after a timeout (in case of long running sessions). This keeps the context lean.
trickleup 5 days ago
We have taken to letting our agents use specific CLIs directly and we narrow down their access control with nono tool sandboxing via a customized Pi agent running headless. We have one agent that can use the aws CLI and nono feeds in a phantom SigV4 credential and then policy limits to just read-only http methods and certain L7 filtering on paths to limit its abilities - this means we can have it monitor and debug deployment failures without it doing any damage.
It was all largely based off this example https://github.com/nolabs-ai/nono/tree/main/tool-sandbox-exa...
0x696C6961 5 days ago
How is this better than using MCP?
InfinityByTen 5 days ago
I'm really curious how you're dealing with lazy loading. Is the MCP then more like a tool-helper instead of the tools themselves?
I was trying to find out if the MCP has some sort of lazy loading feature/primitive in the works, but there seem to be a lot of disagreements about it.
Intuitively, lazy loading seems to be somewhere between a CLI and vanilla MCP. In the end, it sounds very similar to tiered/ progressive loading similar to images on low bandwidth connections.
0x696C6961 5 days ago
The lazy loading is a harness concern.
tasoeur 5 days ago
My context is realtime visual effect creation, but I’ve used MCP extensively in my (native) custom harness as a way to drive in—app UI updates and of course bidirectional state queries, including framebuffer capture for closed loop verification.
I feel like CLI would probably work too but then I’d end up implementing something similar. That being said, I’ve been bitten by the usual suspects: too many tools will cause context windows to grow quickly and some agents will sometimes skim through a subset of the tool list without querying the entire thing, causing incorrect behavior.
If you have tokens to burn I invite you to check out the source code see how extensively it’s being used: https://github.com/sxp-studio/subjective-zero
(video to see the MCP in action, it’s a bit long so feel free to skip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcI1tsPJ8eM)
Another kind of cool use of MCP that I’ve encountered is actually from… the French government! They do it for their open data initiative: https://github.com/datagouv/datagouv-mcp
RebeccaTheDev 5 days ago
For what I am using it for, I recently wrote a little web app called Afterfeed [0] that lets you view backups from social media websites as a single unified timeline.
To put this into perspective, I was a voracious social media user for decades. For me, this is 25 years of data, close to 100,000 posts, spanning everything from LiveJournal in 2001 to Mastodon in 2026. But when put together, it is a timeline of my life.
As kind of a last minute idea, I added an MCP server because why not? Once I wired an LLM up to it, I could ask introspective questions and find new ways of looking at myself and my own history. Simple things like "what was I doing 10 years ago around this time?" to more complex things like researching past thought patterns.
altmanaltman 5 days ago
Interesting idea. I left social media over half a decade ago and just nuked my accounts. Something like this could have been useful. Like a personal archive
jamesponddotco 5 days ago
I built an MCP server for my voice assistant. By default, Home Assistant offers a few tools to the models, but I felt like it was missing some, so I built it.
It has tools to get real jokes, do math, unit conversion, get stock information, search the web with Kagi, and other things I consider to be essential in a voice assistant. It even got approved by my wife.
At work I use our MCP server to debug and troubleshoot issues with our code too. Just yesterday I used it to figure out why a tag wasn’t showing up in traces; using the MCP server, the LLM was able to see that the tag was present in parent traces, but was lost along the way, and figured out why.
Could I find that without the MCP server? Yes, but I’d take me hours of going through lengthy traces, while the MCP and LLM found the issue in minutes.
erikus 5 days ago
I use MCP for a voice assistant as well.
I got a Pebble Index 01 ring and it has support for custom MCP servers. I run one on Tailscale and it can interact with Home Assistant, my home issue tracker, my Anki setup, etc.
I've come full circle on MCP. With agents with a shell tool they quickly became unnecessary but these days I've been coming up with more agentic use cases where I don't want to give the agent a shell, and a narrower MCP interface is a great fit.
jamesponddotco 5 days ago
You just convinced me to buy a Pebble Index, which I was on the fence about. No idea it supported MCP servers.
qwerpy 5 days ago
> Home Assistant
I've been using https://github.com/homeassistant-ai/ha-mcp for my Home Assistant instance and it has been awesome.
"What amps and charging schedule should I set my EV to charge at, so that at peak electricity rate time my house battery is at 90%." Looks at my house battery, car battery, current weather forecast, and house solar production, all of which are integrated into my Home Assistant. Looks at my gmail calendar. "16 amps, 9:30am-3:30pm, higher than usual because you're driving to lunch from 11am-12pm" (shows math). It can even go ahead and set it for me but I haven't given it read/write access to my car yet.
hkchad 5 days ago
MCP's are great for adoption of your service outside of developer circles. Non Technical users can click a link, trigger an OAuth flow and authenticate. You can't do that with API. API still is better for developers using a AI via a CLI but MCP is easier adoption for web or desktop based clients.
diegof79 5 days ago
This (points up)!
I've read many comments about how good CLIs are, and they are right. But for developers.
For non-tech people, installing the CLI is a hurdle: it involves having the right dependencies installed, controlling how you handle secrets (like API keys), and handling updates (ie. npx with a private registry). But for internal tools, once you create an MCP with OAuth, the installation (in Claude) is straightforward.
I'm surprised how non-tech people in the company use it for ad-hoc integrations, like pulling emails, getting deals from HubSpot, enriching that with the internal MCP, then drafting responses. Of course, this has scaling issues, and at some point it is better to move these everyday automations to a proper system, but I saw how MCP enables what products like Zapier, n8n, or IFTTT try to do: user-friendly ad-hoc integrations.
My only complaint: implementing MCP auth in an MCP server still isn't very streamlined. Some libraries, like Cloudflare MCP, simplify all of that, but AFAIK it's tied to using their services.
ckor 5 days ago
>implementing MCP auth in an MCP server still isn't very streamlined.
That's why services like https://zapier.com/mcp provide still a ton of value, because it helps non technical folks have the MCP server ready to run.
janee 5 days ago
yes, this is the proper use case.
We hooked up fly.io's sprites mcp to our company claude and now all employees can spin up dev envs and actually prototype, verify or reproduce something before coming to engineering; doing it directly from web or wherever and it's properly authed and sandboxed through their accounts
hadlock 10 hours ago
MCP is great for attaching chat interfaces with it. It's so good it's slightly detrimental, people start trying to build dashboards with it only to find out you can't make deterministic dashboards with a non-deterministic workflow. The number of people who want API access, now that they've been properly exposed to the data, has doubled month over month since we put in the MCP back in April.
simonw 5 days ago
I recently started using it as a way to make my own custom software available to regular ChatGPT and Claude, both of which support MCP if you dig around deep enough. Here's my TIL: https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/mcp-in-claude-and-chatgpt
tducret 5 days ago
Same here. I was inspired by your post https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/stateless-mcp/
I reversed engineered my supermarket API and made a custom MCP to automate my grocery shopping. Now I can fill my cart through ChatGPT.
More details about it on https://ducret.dev/grocery-shopping-with-ai/
tajd 5 days ago
me three (at this point)
I've developed and deployed my own self hosted (on cloudflare / workerd) tool here https://github.com/TAJD/projektor and the key part was to be able to add it as a custom mcp server
earthdeity 5 days ago
I hooked up claude code to Jira and Figma.
This is more a condemnation of Jira than anything, but being able to interact with it in natural language in the terminal is a huge relief.
Sadly, it's still limited in some ways.
If it's available, it makes things a tiny bit easier than interfacing directly via api, so it's a nice to have.
agentdev001 5 days ago
> "it makes things a tiny bit easier than interfacing directly via api"
By what metric? I would expect that a thin API client (with readable code) is generally going to out-perform a tool-surface which you don't have the ability to manage/edit.
Our_Benefactors 5 days ago
If you don’t use the MCP Claude will default to taking screenshots of figma designs.
altmanaltman 5 days ago
This is what I don't get often when people say "ai will be the ui". Like pressing a button to get an action done for me will always be quicker than asking an LLM to do an action and then waiting for it to understand and do that action. Why will I not prefer to just press the button?
I run a lot of services to track my life and work and theoritically I could hook up their apis or mcp if supported to a harness and pretend like "oh its a talking computer that can do whatever i ask" but in reality, I can go through the native ui of those services esp with things like hot-keys for a faster and more ergonomic experience than talking to a jarvis and having to recorrect it if its wrong
lazyasciiart 5 days ago
When you are holding a pet, or washing the dishes?
fl0id 5 days ago
not OP, but then I'm washing the dishes and don't need to do anything else.
jadar 5 days ago
I did this as well. I found that it was really inefficient because if I was doing anything with a significant amount of text, it has to shuttle all of that through the model to the MCP invocation. It was way better to work with temporary files and pipe them around CLI tools once you’re happy with the contents. E.g. developing a user story and creating the Jira issue.
cgarvis 5 days ago
MCP is for when your end user (the one driving an LLM Agent) is non technical. Most non technical people are not going to install a CLI on their computer. Most are not going to be driving the LLM agent via a terminal.
It also very helpful when you need auth. MCP OAuth with CIMD makes it easy instead of cumbersome process of generating API Keys.
If you are technical and already using CLIs, then MCP doesn't give you much.
edgyquant 5 days ago
Even with a cli it doesn’t have a nice list of all commands and a nice description of when to call such a tool
amclennon 5 days ago
I often find that a lot of models will call the `--help` flag to figure out the commands and arguments nowadays. If I use a cli repeatedly, I'll generally ask it to create a skill
konart 5 days ago
My company (I'm not part of the team that's responsible for anything AI related) has MCP's for Jira, Confluence, Mattermost fork and a few other integrations.
I have no idea about MCP vs API question but I always assumed that the whole point of MCP was an abstration between the model and the tool\service.
As in model does not have to know about a certain API (not to mention a particular version of it) to work with a service.
Eldodi 5 days ago
MCP usage is at an all-time peak - 17M daily (!) downloads of the official SDKs.
We're using MCP for virtually all our SaaS and infra providers (CRM, ATS, banking and accounting, Notion, Linear, all dev tools and hosting platforms) it's become a hard requirement in our buy bechmark. No MCP = NOGO
The advantages are:
- baked-in auth: no need to configure anything, it just works with our employees accounts
- one click install with Codex Plugins and Claude Connectors
patwolf 5 days ago
I don't use MCPs much for personal use, but I've come to see the benefits of having a standardized mechanism for distributing tools across non-dev teams, especially when they're using a hodgepodge of agents.
I'm also excited about the upcoming SEP-2640 extension to MCP, which will be allow skills to be delivered via MCP. While the skill format has been standardized, skill distribution hasn't. I know there are tools like Vercel skills CLI, but that's not a good option for non-devs.
ByteOfWood 5 days ago
I work for a construction design company, and marking up on PDFs is a very common task, so we use Bluebeam. I've found it's better just to have the agent call the MCP with python or edit the pdf directly, since (at least with Claude) there's no way to pipe data into the MCP directly; the agent has to output everything itself. For this reason alone I feel like command line tools are just the better way forward for most things.
boltguo 5 days ago
I built a small MCP service tool to my own learning; it retrieves study materials and course content, enabling me to learn through voice-based interactive conversations with ChatGPT. logs my learning data, which I can then retrieve and analyze to assess my overall progress.
SegmentTree 5 days ago
We use MCP when security and tight capability boundaries are important.
For example, even GitHub’s fine-grained tokens aren’t always fine-grained enough for our use cases. In those situations, it’s straightforward to build a small MCP server that exposes exactly the operations we want an agent to have access to.
That gives us a much smaller and more explicit attack surface, without having to manually audit every possible GitHub CLI invocation the agent might make.
kqr 5 days ago
I get this use-case, but what makes an MCP server better than a custom CLI tool that exposes those same operations? That's how I've solved similar things in the past.
edgyquant 5 days ago
Mcp just wraps the existing calls with a description of when to use them. Why would you write a cli for something like this? And clis generally have a help call but that doesn’t say when to use a tool just what it does
itzprintz 5 days ago
Reporting is what we use MCP for.
We do social media community management ( https://trollwall.ai/mcp ) and our customers want to know what their followers are talking about - topics, sentiment, why are people angry, showing actual example comments, comparing to last month.. Having a conversation about this is much better UX than having dashboard or static report (.. your Claude can at the end even generate PDF report on what you talked about).
We tried to build different analytics screens for this and we always found out that different types of customers what their own angle. MCP, together with knowledge/memory of their own ChatGPT/Claude, allows them to super customize it for what they want and need.
div3rs3 5 days ago
I assume the target audience for the question is developers. That will generate many responses along the lines of ”just use a CLI”.
The current, main driver I see for MCP servers are non-technical people who want to securely connect data sources to their AI application.
harijoe 5 days ago
MCP Apps are the only way to build a connector that's actually usable from
inside the Claude and ChatGPT apps. They return chunks of UI alongside the
tool result, so a CLI simply can't provide the same functionality.
And you can't expect an average user to install a CLI on their machine just to search for flights or do shopping for example.
I work at Alpic, where we build Skybridge, a framework for developing MCP Apps. Our users have apps published on the ChatGPT and Claude stores, and they've seen traffic quietly growing over the last few months. Traffic isn't massive yet, but it costs little to stake out ground on a new channel and be ready if it takes off.
olmo23 5 days ago
For us it's pretty much a standard request from our clients now: that they are able to use their chatbot to interact with the ERP systems.
softwarewright 3 days ago
I am a single person LLC so my "production" is just me using AI to build things.
I use MCP for some things, like Playwright; for web UI development, but I also use CLIs, especially custom CLIs I create that have built-in help for the AI coding agent to use. I just to run my command (in the path) with --help and it figures out how to use. This seems more straightforward and efficient than MCP.
I have written MCP servers for all sorts of things, like monitoring remote systems, operating a PvP game as PvAI, others but lately I just create a new CLI with help. I use this with Claude, Codex, Gemini, and opencode (z.ai GLM) instead of dealing with how each agent registers MCPs.
ma2kx 5 days ago
In general the advantage of MCP would be the possibility for a fine grained control over the tools the agent is allowed to use. But unfortunately there is a myriad of nightmarish awful mcp servers around which are worse than direct API access or even a cli integration.
I wont advertise any commercial mcp I use but to give an example for a well designed and useful mcp server I could name the nixos mcp. Its useful because it bundles all the nix resources to one endpoint which is more efficient than web search and gives you better control over the sources.
https://github.com/utensils/mcp-nixos
Another one would be this filesystem mcp which is in my opinion to prefer over direct cli access. Of course this depends also on your general sandbox strategy but if you just use a generic docker image there are still many potentially dangerous binaries available and such an mcp can restrict the models capabilities.
https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
And of course there are many service provider offering their mcp with its own llm / agent behind e.g. most web search provider. In this case you most likely already use an mcp without noticing it.