Teams are rushing to make their internal tools available to agents. That is good. It is also where a lot of design mistakes begin.
The question usually shows up like this:
Should we expose this as an MCP server, or should the agent just use our CLI?
That framing makes it sound like one option is more “agentic” than the other. I do not think that is the useful distinction. A CLI and an MCP server solve different problems. The better question is: where does this capability naturally live, and what contract does the agent need in order to use it well?
MCP, now hosted by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, gives the open agentic AI ecosystem a shared protocol for connecting agents to tools, data, and applications. That shared protocol matters because teams should not have to rebuild the same integration patterns for every agent runtime. But MCP is not a reason to wrap every executable in a server. Sometimes a CLI is exactly the right interface. Sometimes an MCP server is. Often, the answer is both, with different responsibilities.
