MCP vs CLI for AI Agents: A Real AWS Benchmark (and Why the Popular Narrative Asks the Wrong Question)

Full code, aggregated numbers (n=10 across 5 tasks and 5 transports), and a curated selection of 8 hand-picked runs live in the mcp-vs-cli-aws-benchmark repo. This article is a dense version of docs/findings.md from the same repo, rewritten for a reader who doesn't have an hour to study the test harness. TL;DR The question in the title is wrong. "MCP or CLI?" assumes they have the same use case and one of them is objectively better. In reality it's a trade-off between two currencies: engineering