Tom Stern

MCP vs CLI for LLMs is the wrong discussion. People are debating at the wrong layer. Both work incredibly well as long as they are run through a repl like environment that can persist state. The funny thing about CLI is that CLI tools are usually accessed through BASH which happens to be a repl with persistent state (the file system), therefore cli works much better than mcp. But this isn't even close to being an intrinsic property of MCP. Just means that we need better harnesses. Right now the best repl for this are: - bash + fs - jupyter kernels - codemode type repls, usually quickjs LLMs understand the concept of forward evolving a system to solve a need very well. This comes from the agentic RL. They understand how to change the state of a codebase or acquire data from databases and then operate on it similarly to humans. But without an execution environment, they actually cannot do this properly. My bet? Sometime soon someone will (or has already?) create a embeddable, sqlite style mini execution environment that parses bash, typescript, or tool calls into a common IL execution plan that's easy to security check before executing. And design this specifically for durable execution environments. Then we will just connect cli, mcp, webmcp, whatever to that and it accepts any of the input modalities as they can all be represented as each other.