MCP is Dead; Long Live MCP!

A nuanced defense of MCP (Model Context Protocol) against the current social media backlash favoring CLIs. The author argues that while CLIs make sense for well-known tools already in LLM training data, custom CLIs face the same context-bloat problems as MCP without the structure. The key distinction missed in most discourse is between local MCP over stdio (often unnecessary) versus remote MCP over HTTP, which unlocks centralized auth/OAuth, telemetry via OpenTelemetry, dynamic prompt and resource delivery, and consistent tooling across org-wide agent runtimes. For enterprises moving from vibe-coding to disciplined agentic engineering, remote MCP servers provide security, observability, and automatic content synchronization that CLI-based approaches cannot easily replicate.