MCP and skills complement each other, it’s not one vs the other.

> MCP apps do not have a manual invocation option. If you enable them, they are always on, eating away tokens

This is not true of recent harnesses. They will not consume any tokens until the LLM searches for tools. Similar to how they handle skills, and that’s my point: they can and do manage tools and skills similarly. They could easily let you invoke tools explicitly as well , it’s maybe their choice not to.

> Output of an MCP tool call goes straight into context. Output of a CLI tool call can be filtered by the LLM using another tool, before it enters context.

That’s a good point, but this is not about MCP , it’s about tools in general. Tools can provide structured output which should allow for even more advanced usages by the LLM than a text-based CLI approach. However I haven’t seen that done yet and it could be a nice feature to address!