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CLI vs MCP

Pros and cons of CLI and MCP as agent-friendly interfaces, and when to invest in each.

Every software company needs to work on its offerings' agent interfaces. How friendly and preferred are your product offerings for agents?

CLI and MCP are two very inherently agent-friendly interfaces for your offerings. This post objectively lists the pros and cons of each.

Whatever you prefer, you will likely need to build both. Maintaining multiple surface areas for your offerings adds to your maintenance tax, so deciding which use cases each surface should cater to can help you invest your resources best.

CLI pros

  • Very agent friendly.
  • You don't need tools for everything — you can leverage the filesystem. For example, if you want to work with a Notion CLI, an agent can simply run a command to pull a workspace or document, operate on it as a file, and then push it back to the cloud at the end.
  • CI baby! CI will increasingly drive revenue for SaaS companies in an agent-first world. Investing in a CLI makes your offering CI-friendly.

CLI cons

  • Auth generally happens via an API key or OAuth2 — figuring out this kind of auth in a cloud agent without exposing the credential directly to the agent is hard.
  • Limited governance controls.

MCP pros

  • Agent native — this tech is built for agents. It's here to stay, and it will keep getting better.
  • Governance controls — at the org level you can provision which MCPs are allowed behind a common MCP gateway. The governance ecosystem around MCP will keep improving.
  • Auth controls — MCP gateway products can manage MCP auth at a single layer, making your auth workflows super smooth. This is especially relevant for cloud agent workflows.

MCP cons

  • MCP servers that try to do all complicated operations lead to tool explosion. Take GitHub — I'm yet to meet a smart developer who prefers the GitHub MCP over the GitHub CLI. As you power complicated workflows you need a lot of tools, and unlike CLIs, agents are not yet very good at handling tool explosion.

My two cents

Build both CLI and MCP, especially if you're in the dev tools market. MCP should be super good at your core workflows, with a particular focus on read-only workflows. For complicated workflows and CI, invest heavily in the CLI.