I've found it much more useful to create an MCP server, and this is where Claude really shines. You would just say to Claude on web, mobile or CLI that it should "describe our connectivity to google" either via one of the three interfaces, or via `claude -p "describe our connectivity to google"`, and it will just use your tool without you needing to do anything special. It's like custom-added intelligence to Claude.
You can do this. Claude Code can do everything the toy agent this post shows, and much more. But you shouldn't, because doing that (1) doesn't teach you as much as the toy agent does, (2) isn't saving you that much time, and (3) locks you into Claude Code's context structure, which is just one of a zillion different structures you can use. That's what the post is about, not automating ping.
I'd second the article on this, but also add to it that the biggest reason MCP servers don't really matter much any more is that the models are so capable of working with APIs, that most of the time you can just point them at an API and give them a spec instead. And the times that doesn't work, just give them a CLI tool with a good --help option.
Now you have a CLI tool you can use yourself, and the agent has a tool to use.
Anthropic itself have made MCP server increasingly pointless: With agents + skills you have a more composeable model that can use the model capabilities to do all an MCP server can with or without CLI tools to augment them.
I feel the CLI vs MCP debate is an apples to oranges framing. When you're using claude you can watch it using CLI's, running brew, mise, lots of jq but what about when you've built an agent that needs to work through a complicated API? You don't want to make 5 CRUD calls to get the right answer. A curated MCP tool ensures it can determinism where it matters most.. when interacting with customer data
Even in the case where you need to group steps together in a deterministic manner, you don't need an MCP server for that. You just need to bundle those steps into a CLI or API endpoint.
That was my point. Going the extra step and wrapping it in an MCP provides minimal advantage vs. just writing a SKILL.md for a CLI or API endpoint.
