Building a developer tool where the user is the developer? Use CLI + Skills. Add an 800-token skill file. You get the best efficiency in the benchmark, and you don’t need per-user auth because you are the user. Building a product where agents act on behalf of customers? You need MCP’s authorization model. But don’t connect directly to 43-tool servers — the cost and reliability numbers are real. Building multi-tenant enterprise infrastructure? You need both: MCP’s auth model for governance, plus a gateway that solves the efficiency and reliability problems the benchmark exposed. The gateway architecture: CLI efficiency + MCP authorization Schema filtering. Instead of injecting all 43 GitHub tool schemas, a gateway returns only the 2–3 tools relevant to the current request. MCP drops from 44,000 tokens to ~3,000 — approaching CLI efficiency. ~90% token reduction. Connection pooling. Instead of each agent session establishing its own TCP connection to every MCP server, a gateway maintains persistent connections and absorbs transient failures. 28% failure rate → ~1%. Auth centralization. Instead of each agent managing OAuth tokens per service, the gateway handles token refresh, scope enforcement, and audit logging in one place. Single auth boundary per tenant. Source: MCP vs CLI Benchmarking/Report — published March 11, 2026, based on 75 benchmark runs comparing CLI and MCP on identical tasks using Claude Sonnet 4. submitted by /u/nishant_growthromeo
Originally posted by u/nishant_growthromeo on r/ArtificialInteligence