The Hook
Scalekit ran 75 benchmark runs comparing CLI and MCP agents on identical GitHub tasks. CLI was 10 to 32x cheaper and 100% reliable. MCP hit only 72% — failing on more than a quarter of tasks (source).
Perplexity's CTO reported that MCP tool descriptions consumed 72% of the available context window before the agent performed any actual work (source).
The narrative is everywhere: MCP is the future, CLI is legacy. But the numbers tell a different story — and one where the real answer isn't "pick one."
The Token Cost Theory
