I love the idea of MCP, but it needs a progressive disclosure mechanism. A large MCP from a provider with hundreds or even thousands of tools can eat up a huge amount of your context window. Additionally, MCPs come in a bunch of different flavors in terms of transport and auth mechanisms, and not all harnesses support all those options well.

I’ve gone the other way, and used MCP-CLI to define all my MCP servers and wrap them in a CLI command for agent use. This lets me easily use them both locally and in cloud agents, without worrying about the harness support for MCP or how much context window will be eaten up. I have a minimal skill for how to use MCP-CLI, with progressive disclosure in the skill for each of the tools exposed by MCP-CLI. Works great.

All that said, I do think MCP will probably be the standard going forward, it just has too much momentum. Just need to solve progressive disclosure (like skills have!) and standardize some of the auth and transport layer stuff.