From MCPs to CLIs: Why Command-Line Interfaces Are Replacing Model Context Protocols

Model Context Procotols (MCPs) is no longer the cool kid on the block

Command Line Interfaces (CLIs) are here to stay

Consider what happened to the Playright team as a case study

Playright released their own MCP server 11 months ago

So what happened?

It worked but it ate too many tokens!

Then Playright team released Playright CLI

playwright-cli install --skills

gave me

✅ Workspace initialized at `/Users/slava/Developer/dev/slavakurilyak/go-agentic`.
✅ Skills installed to `.claude/skills/playwright-cli`.
✅ Found chrome, will use it as the default browser.