I Stopped Building MCP Servers. Here's Why.

For the last six months I've been building command-line tools for agents instead of MCP servers — and after Anthropic shipped Skills, I'm convinced this is the right pattern for most agentic work.

In this 12-minute explainer:
→ The token bill: why a single GitHub MCP server can blow 55,000 tokens before you even ask it anything
→ Adam Jones' viral screenshot — 3.9% of context gone before "hello"
→ Why MCP responses bloat too — 100,000 tokens to copy what a human pastes in two seconds
→ Anthropic's own fix: 150K → 2K with progressive disclosure (Skills)
→ The pyramid: CLI for deterministic operations · Skills for agent guidance · LLM only for reasoning
→ How Skills layer — atl-jira pulls in only when Jira is needed (not all 5 surfaces upfront)
→ The proof: atl-cli, figma-cli, vidsnatch, and a personal Outlook CLI — all pattern-matched to one shape
→ The manifesto: "I stopped building tools for humans. I build tools for agents. Then agents build software for humans."
→ Why this isn't just my opinion — Atlassian, Figma, Cloudflare, Notion all ship CLIs alongside MCP. OpenAI Codex CLI, Gemini, Copilot all read SKILL.md.
→ Playwright: 114K-token MCP vs ~27K with skill+CLI — same task, 76% fewer tokens
→ Where MCP still wins (it's not dead — just over-applied)
→ Live demo: 4 surfaces, 4 CLIs, one agent harness, no MCP server in sight

This is episode 04 of a series for engineers actually shipping with agents — not just reading about them.
Episode 05 drops in two weeks.

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 The cold open — six months without MCP
0:30 The token bill — 55K before "hello"
1:00 Adam Jones' screenshot — 3.9% gone
1:28 The response pass-back — 100K for one paste
2:04 Anthropic's own fix — 150K → 2K
2:34 The pyramid — CLI · Skills · LLM
3:09 Skills can layer — atl-jira / atl-confluence
3:39 Skills + CLI = lazy MCP
4:12 The open standard — Atlassian, Figma, Cloudflare, Notion
4:44 atl-cli — Jira + Confluence in one binary
5:31 figma-cli — PNG export + W3C tokens
6:10 vidsnatch + a personal Outlook CLI
6:43 The manifesto — tools for agents
7:03 The world is converging — logo wall
7:54 Browser-Use's dialect chain
8:23 Playwright A/B — 114K vs 27K tokens
9:02 The honest wall-clock — where MCP still wins
9:33 Live demo — 4 CLIs, one harness
10:23 Skills plug into every harness
11:00 Outro — what to do this week

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Atlassian-cli: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sahajamit/atlassian-cli
Figma-cli: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sahajamit/figma-cli

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#agents #mcp #cli #anthropic #claude #ai #skills

Видео I Stopped Building MCP Servers. Here's Why. канала The Agentic Engineer