The whole premise of MCPs was that agents need some new standardized protocol to talk to tools, but CLIs already do this and they've done it for decades. They're backwards compatible with basically everything and LLMs already think in text in text out natively. No translation layer, no schema, no overhead. MCPs are genuinely a solution looking for a problem that CLIs solved 40 years ago.

I've been testing this myself and the results kind of speak for themselves. I pointed OpenClaw with Opus 4.6 at a 20k member subreddit with nothing but CLI access. No MCPs, no special integrations, just a model with a computer.

In one week it made two all time top posts, built insane karma (3k+) on a week old account, drove 70+ waitlist signups autonomously, attracted 300 inbox messages from strangers, and did it all with zero paid promotion. People gave the account reddit gold (actual money) because it was genuinely helpful.

No protocol made that happen. A CLI and a capable model did. The MCP crowd keeps stacking abstraction layers while agents that just use computers the way humans do are out here shipping real results. CLIs are the universal interface and LLMs just made that obvious.

I'm curious what this community thinks though. Am I wrong here? Is there a real use case for MCPs that CLIs genuinely can't handle?

Because from where I'm sitting, giving your agent a terminal is all you need.