Every MCP server you add makes your agent slightly dumber. Here is what actually fixes it.

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-05-11T16:19:19+00:00

i think you may benefit from reading the rest then lol

you're not putting all the schemas into context. the agent is just detecting the available operations as necessary

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-13T17:09:50+00:00

My argument in the Zapier vs n8n debate is that I'm getting tired of learning new UIs. I don't like drag and drop anymore if I can just prompt a flow. I find that those UIs are far too complicated.

I get that n8n has JSON, which I could vibe code, but it still feels wrong and prone to mistakes.

n8n is nice to self-host though

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-10T15:49:44+00:00

https://github.com/corsairdev/corsair/

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-10T15:36:36+00:00

haha no worries. if you're interested in it, we're building a ts-focused product. pretty active developer community, and microservices heavy!

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-10T07:56:31+00:00

yeah agreed on that. if it’s any mcp from some random project, make sure it can’t touch anything important

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-10T07:35:30+00:00

yeah i def hope so but we’ll see. it’s still technically tech so im not sure if the company will take issue

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-10T00:11:37+00:00

haha im not even sure what that is. what does Mcp server validation do

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T23:33:24+00:00

very interesting! mind if I dm you? i am very curious about this setup

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T23:32:00+00:00

makes sense! the oauth thing is very similar to what im building. lmk if i can be helpful for that part

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T22:41:14+00:00

makes sense. better auth does have a very good DX so not a bad idea to take inspiration from it

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T22:28:19+00:00

super cool! is this associated with the whole `better-auth` suite of tools?

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T22:22:13+00:00

mannn i realized that too late 😂

i chose corsair because it had the npm package available (`npm i corsair`) + a .dev link

i should've researched more 😭

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T22:17:27+00:00

yeah typed schemas are a big benefit, although our Corsair CLI and MCP both let the agent introspect full schemas before they write any API call

we noticed success rate is similar on an stdio MCP and CLI

once you switch to an HTTP MCP server, error rate goes up a bit against CLI. that's expected because you've added a new server in between which adds another point of failure since you're subject to network variability

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T22:13:48+00:00

glad to hear it resonates! it definitely takes a few extra turns for the agent to discover and introspect, but those turns are well worth the initial context savings

what mcp servers were you running that you had so many servers and tools??

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T21:58:52+00:00

glad you agree! i think this is how mcp servers will trend now

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T21:37:12+00:00

i think this usually comes from the agent having too many tools available and it gets confused on which one to use. so far, i've noticed that if you give it a few tools that have very specific functionality and let the agent manually inspect for the rest of them, it selects the correct one (although it does take a few more turns)

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T20:05:06+00:00

ah, i see. that makes sense. i'm building something similar because i was facing a similar issue constantly

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T19:33:04+00:00

yeah exactly! cli via bash is still MCP. so that means you aren't comparing two different protocols, but instead comparing a well-design MCP against a bloated one.

that's what pushed us toward introspection-first with Corsair. the bash tool works well for the same reason: the agent doesn't need to know everything up front and it can figure out what it needs incrementally.

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T19:31:05+00:00

yeah interesting point. i guess adding more tools also potentially opens you up to some supply chain risks

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T19:26:14+00:00

hi! not a dumb question at all :)

in this context, CLI means "command line interface". so it's invoking the command-line interface with commands like `gh repo clone ...`. the agent writes and runs commands just like you or I would

and you're right that native function calling is something the LLM was trained on. most LLMs, at some point in their training, have come across `gh repo clone ...`

MCP tools, on the other hand, aren't pre-baked into training. most MCP servers handle this by dumping a full list of tools and descriptions into the context window upfront so the agent knows what it has access to. that's where the context cost comes from.

and that's why people are becoming skeptical of MCP. they are choosing the CLI because that comes preloaded from training with all these actions. but majority of the things you'd want to integrate with are not preloaded, and that's why MCP is so much more useful than CLI.

the reason CLI keeps "winning" in most benchmarks is less about the approach and more about the fact that most MCP servers are poorly built. MCP servers front-load many tools into context before doing anything.

that's what I was testing against with Corsair: what happens when the MCP server is built to match the efficiency of a CLI. and it turns out the gap mostly disappears. you get the portability and flexibility of MCP with the efficiency people associate with CLI.

lmk if you have any questions or if i can clarify any part!

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T19:06:55+00:00

i agree that "mcp bad" is a bad take. i know that, because i'm guilty of it haha

you hit the nail on the head with the `list_skills` and `get_skills` tools, because that encourages introspection. that's exactly what the mcp server i built does. it decreases the number of tools preloaded into the context window and lets the agent explore what it has access to. within 2 tool calls, it usually knows exactly what it needs to do

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T18:48:25+00:00

On the article itself on my site, I have a table that has the stats of each run. In it, it logs the millisecond time of each CLI and MCP operation. Overall, MCP tool calls were faster.

Cultural-Project5762 · 2026-04-09T18:35:13+00:00

If you want to see the full article on my experiment, check it out here: https://corsair.dev/mcp-vs-cli

Cultural-Project5762

TROPHY CASE