CLI-first AI Agents: Why I Build Small Tools Instead of MCP Servers
I build AI agents for a living, and the single most useful thing I’ve done for them is stop giving them big interfaces. No SDKs. No sprawling APIs. No MCP servers with twenty tools registered at boot. Instead I give them what Unix gave us forty years ago: small, sharp, isolated CLI tools they can compose. One job each. Text in, text out. That’s the whole methodology. This post is the short version of why. ...