MCP solves a very specific problem: how do you ship a LLM’s tool/function so that it is callable by an LLM in an inter-process manner (so that you don’t need to modify OpenAI’s code to make your tool available in ChatGPT)? CLIs concern what happens inside such tools, namely a `bash` tool. As you can see they are different layers of the same stack.

> LLMs don’t need a special protocol ... LLMs are really good at using command-line tools.

The author's point only makes sense if LLMs all have a computer built-in - they don't. LLMs will only have a commandline if it is provided with commandline tools, and MCP is the standard way to provide tools.

If I have to find an analogy for this (nonsensical) MCP vs. CLI framing, it's like someone saying “ditch the browser, use html instead” - what is that supposed to mean?