Why CLI over MCP?

Everyone wants to make things agent-friendly now, so are MCPs better than CLIs? When Claude Code started hitting limits, I began using Kimi (with OpenCode ) alongside Claude. Only then, I realized the portability issue: I needed to set up MCP again on OpenCode, and again for Codex. While MCPs are tied to the integration layer, CLIs are tied to the operating system. So if you build a CLI, you are betting on something much simpler , that the agent can run a shell command. A few days ago I asked my