Does anyone run their own AI service?
If so,
Which one?
What hardware?
Do you have a way to access it from outside or from a phone?
And, if you’re open to sharing, what do you do with it?
I know AI-enabling hardware is insanely expensive right now, but some of the smaller (<32GB) more efficient models (think deepseek- or qwen-based) don’t absolutely need specialized hardware to run and perform well enough for many purposes.
I am so aware of the absolutely abysmal privacy practices of basically all AI companies that I’m not comfortable using them to help me with web searches and the such, because there’s no way that all this information won’t be going into a profile. This makes me want to have my own “helper” service.
I agree with you for common CLIs that the model will natural have in its training set, but when building your own CLI it seems like the self-documenting nature and progressive disclosure of MCP would have a huge advantage.
With a cli you don’t have the prefix cost, but your agent also doesn’t know that the tool exists, what it’s for, how to use it, etc. once you give it that information, then you have the same issues with prefix cost, right? Changing tools does break the prefix cache, but changing tools is a thing you can do. You can’t change (model awareness of) CLI, and if you could then it’d also break the prefix cache, or you’d have tool instructions scattered throughout the context without structure.
Dumping to file is a harness thing, not a MCP thing. A harness will do the same with large terminal outputs.
Likewise setting up a new CLI can be complicated. I never see an agent try to install an mcp, but I also don’t typically see it try to install a new CLI.
I don’t see how mcp is any more a fixed set of tools than CLI is. It’s just presented to the agent in a structured way, which is important for discovery and instruction following.
But yeah ease of chaining is certainly useful wrt CLI. That’s a huge win for sure.