CLI vs MCP vs Skills: The Whole Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question

What They're Fighting About In March 2026, the hottest topic in the AI Agent world isn't which model is smarter — it's a deceptively boring architecture question: How should an Agent call external tools? Three camps, three answers: The MCP Camp (Model Context Protocol): An open standard Anthropic launched in late 20241. It wraps service interfaces in a unified JSON-RPC protocol so an Agent can call multiple tools across platforms after a single integration. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and AWS have all followed suit2. Sounds great on paper. The CLI Camp: Just let the Agent run shell commands — git log, gh pr list, curl, kubectl. No protocol layer, no extra servers. The grep and awk from 50 years ago are having a second life in the AI era. The Skills Camp: A Markdown file acts as a "cheat sheet," teaching the Agent which tool to use in which situation. It sits idle at ~30 tokens and only loads the full instructions when triggered. Flask creator Armin Ronacher has fully switched to this ap