Show HN: Mcp2cli – One CLI for every API, 96-99% fewer tokens than native MCP (opens in new tab)

It turns out everyone is having the same idea.

But why advertise it and try to make it into a product?

I was inspired by clihub (I credited them) but I also wanted 3 additional things.

1. OpenAPI support 2. Dynamic CLI generation. I don’t want to recompile my CLI if the server changes. 3. An agent skill

Next we'll wrap the CLIs into MCPs.

Oh wait there's ssh. I guess it's because there's no way to tell AI agents what the tool does, or when to invoke it... Except that AI pretty much knows the syntax of all of the standard tools, even sed, jq, etc...

Yeah, ssh should've been the norm, but someone is getting promoted for inventing MCP

MCP can provide validation & verification of the request before making the API call. Giving the model a /tool/forecast URL doesn't prevent the model from deciding to instead explore what other tools might be available on the remote server instead, like deciding to try running /tool/imagegenerator or /tool/globalthermonuclearwar. MCP can gatekeep what the AI does, check that parameters are valid, etc.

Also, MCP can be used to do local computation, work with local files etc, things that web access wouldn't give you. CLI will work for some of those use cases too, but there is a maximum command line length limit, so you might struggle to write more than 8kB to a file when using the command line, for example. It can be easier to get MCP to work with binary files as well.

I tend to think of local MCP servers like DLLs, except the function calls are over stdio and use tons of wasteful JSON instead of being a direct C-function call. But thinking of where you might use a DLL and where you might call out to a CLI can be a useful way of thinking about the difference.

You could restrict where it can go with domain allowlists but that has insufficient granularity. The same URL can serve a legitimate request or exfiltrate data depending on what's in the headers or payload: see https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2025/claude-abusing-net...

So you need to restrict not only where the agent can reach, but what operations it can perform, with the host controlling credentials and parameters. That brings us to an MCP-like solution.

Being able to have a verifiable input/output structure is key. I suppose you can do that with a regular http api call (json) but where do you document the openapi/schema stuff? Oh yeah...something like mcp.

I agree that mcp isn't as refined as it should be, but when used properly it's better than having it burn thru tokens by scraping around web content.

Not all services provide good token definition or access control, and often have API Key + CLI combo which can be quite dangerous in some cases.

With an MCP even these bad interfaces can be fixed up on my side.

Measure fidelity with exact diffs and embedding similarity, and include streaming behavior, schema-change resilience, and rate-limit fallbacks in the cases you care about. Check the repo for a runnable benchmark, archived fixtures captured with vcrpy or WireMock, and a clear test harness that reproduces the claimed 96 to 99 percent savings.

"We measured this. Not estimates — actual token counts using the cl100k_base tokenizer against real schemas, verified by an automated test suite."

I'll add to your comment that it isn't a bug of MCP itself. MCP doesn't specify what the LLM sees. It's a bug of the MCP client.

In my toy chatbot, I implement MCP as pseudo-python for the LLM, dropping typing info, and giving the tool infos as abruptly as possible, just a line - function_name(mandatory arg1 name, mandatory arg2 name): Description

(I don't recommend doing that, it's largely obsolete, my point is simply that you feed the LLM whatever you want, MCP doesn't mandate anything. tbh it doesn't even mandate that it feeds into a LLM, hence the MCP CLIs)

I agree with the general idea that models are better trained to use popular cli tools like directory navigation etc, but outside of ls and ps etc the difference isn't really there, new clis are just as confusing to the model as new mcps.

> I consider this a bug. I'm sure the chat clients will fix this soon enough.

ANTHROP\C's Claudes manage/minimize/mitigate this reaonably.

With a CLI, you avoid sending this context to the LLM and it progressively discovers only what is needed.

The input token costs come down because of using a CLI instead of MCP

But I do wonder about these tools whether they have tested that the quality of subsequent responses is the same.

This method was popularised by beads with a simple command “bd quickstart” to teach the basics to an agent. Think of this as an adaptive learning method for the agent.

I’ve not seen the details of mcp2cli, but let’s just say you had a mcp2cli wrapper over stripe, you can just tell the agent to run mcp2cli for stripe as a provider to learn how to use the rest of the APIs

Essentially I've cloned thousands of mcp servers, used the readmes and the star rating to respond to the qdrant query (star ratings as a boost score have been an attack vector, yes I know, it's an incomplete product [1]), then presents it as a JSON response with "one-shots" which this author calls clis.

I think I became discouraged from working on it and moved on because my results weren't that great but search is hard and I shouldn't give up.

I'll get back on it seeing how good this tool is getting traction.

[1] There needs to be a legitimacy post-filter so that github user micr0s0ft or what-have-you doesn't go to to the top - I'm sure there's some best-of-practice ways of doing this and I shouldn't invent my own (which would involve seeing if the repo appears on non-UGC sites I guess?!) but I haven't looked into it

Great implementation details, but what is the end goal? Ah ha, a readable readme (which itself is promising):

InfiniteMCP is a an MCP server that acts as a universal gateway to thousands of other MCP servers. Instead of manually configuring each MCP server you want to use, InfiniteMCP lets Claude discover, understand, and use any MCP server on demand through natural language queries.

Think of it as an "MCP server of MCP servers" - a single connection that unlocks the entire MCP ecosystem.

So, yeah, that's interesting.

> and then provide it as a free api

Oh, oops, that just became a supply chain threat. Central registries outside of targets' control are grails, and the speculated implementation for secrets makes this a lovely injection path...

If you pursue this, work with someone like control-plane.io to blue/red team it and make noise about that on your README with a link to their findings and your mitigations. And consider sync up with folks like kusari.dev (see also SLSA and GUAC) to include a vulns rating on each MCP itself (their mapping is super fast and a SBOM scanned MCP directory would be a real value add).