I agree. MCPs have the massive problem of not being composable, which is a big strength of shells/CLIs allow.

People make the argument that it doesn't matter for non-programmers. I use Bluebeam (a pdf editor which is standard in the construction industry) daily, and it has an MCP, but a big problem is that if the agent wants to import or export a large amount of data from a document, then it has to regurgitate a bunch of tokens into or out of the MCP. If it were a CLI, then it would just pipe things in and out as it needs.

I ended up just having the agent make a script that wraps the MCP so it can use it as a CLI instead.