MCP was supposed to be the USB-C of AI.

One protocol. Everything connected.

Then developers ran the numbers.

Connecting GitHub's MCP server alone burns 55,000 tokens (before your agent does a single useful thing). So, companies are quietly shifting back to CLI and REST APIs.

Not because MCP failed. Because LLMs are surprisingly fluent in terminal. CLI workflows can cut token usage by 35x. That's a lot of money by the end of the year.

That’s typical pattern with new technologies. A new abstraction layer arrives, gets widely adopted, then specialists find where it leaks... and the pendulum swings back toward what actually scales.

The teams getting it right aren't picking sides. They're building hybrid stacks: CLI for cheap local execution, REST APIs for volume, MCP where governance and auditability actually matter.

The abstraction wars never end. They just find their right level.