MCP Dev Summit Mumbai 2026

We ran 75 benchmark runs comparing CLI and MCP for identical agent tasks. CLI won every efficiency metric.

For the simplest task like identifying a repo's language — CLI used 1,365 tokens. MCP used 44,026. That's a 32x difference, almost entirely schema overhead: 43 tool definitions injected into every conversation, most never touched.

CLI was also 100% reliable. MCP failed 28% of the time like TCP-level timeouts on a remote server that never responded.

If we'd stopped there: use CLI, skip MCP, move on.

But that benchmark tested one scenario: a single developer automating their own workflow. Not what production agent products look like.

The moment your agent acts as your customer's employees inside their orgs, across services they control — CLI becomes a liability. It inherits your credentials. Can't scope per user, per org, or per action. There'd be no audit trail and no consent as well.

The data is real. CLI is faster, cheaper, simpler. For personal dev tools, use it.

But if you're building a product with data that belongs to someone else, CLI works in demos. You won't catch the problem until a customer asks why your agent touched their Salesforce without asking.