MCP vs. CLI for Third-Party Integration: Is the CLI Really Cheaper?
· 6 min read
CatalEx Engineering · Published June 29, 2026 · 09:00 UTC
There's a tidy argument going around: skip the Model Context Protocol, just give the agent a shell and a CLI. No server to run, no schemas to maintain, and — the clincher — it saves tokens, because a command is short and a tool definition is long. It's a good argument. It's also only half right, and the missing half is where most of the cost actually lives.