We use MCP when security and tight capability boundaries are important.
For example, even GitHub’s fine-grained tokens aren’t always fine-grained enough for our use cases. In those situations, it’s straightforward to build a small MCP server that exposes exactly the operations we want an agent to have access to.
That gives us a much smaller and more explicit attack surface, without having to manually audit every possible GitHub CLI invocation the agent might make.
I get this use-case, but what makes an MCP server better than a custom CLI tool that exposes those same operations? That's how I've solved similar things in the past.
Mcp just wraps the existing calls with a description of when to use them. Why would you write a cli for something like this? And clis generally have a help call but that doesn’t say when to use a tool just what it does
For example, even GitHub’s fine-grained tokens aren’t always fine-grained enough for our use cases. In those situations, it’s straightforward to build a small MCP server that exposes exactly the operations we want an agent to have access to.
That gives us a much smaller and more explicit attack surface, without having to manually audit every possible GitHub CLI invocation the agent might make.