OpenClaw, KiloCode and why CLI > MCP

I've been chatting with my developer friends a lot recently on their agentic coding workflows and how they've evolved over the past year. My friend Brandon, co-founder of Agent Systems said:

 Competent engineers with system understanding can basically build anything now (specialization has been erased).

This interview with Clawdbot / OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger was quite insightful. I've listened to it three times. One of the sections I found most fascinating is when Peter is talking about the efficiency and preference for CLIs for his agent workforce. Catch the video below. I captured the core part of the transcript when they're talking about CLI and MCP [1]:

In order for this (OpenClaw) to work you want everything to be a CLI. Why CLIs and not MCPS? MCP is a crutch. The best thing that came out of MCP is it made companies rethink to open up more APIs. The whole concept is silly. You have to pre export all the functions of all the tools and all the explanations when your tool loads. And then the model has to send a precise blob of JSON there and gets JSON back. But surprise, models are really good at using bash. Imagine you have a weather service and the model could ask for a list of available cities and get like 500 cities back, and then it picks one city out of that list but it cannot filter that list because that’s not part of how MCP works … and you’d say okay give me the weather for London. And you’d get weather forecast, temperature, wind… and 50 other things I don’t care about because I just want to know "is it raining or not?" But the model needs to digest everything and then you have so much crap in your context.  Whereas if it’s a CLI I could filter for exactly what it needs.  Companies are solving for this but it doesn’t solve the problem that I cannot chain them. I cannot easily build a script that says hey give me all the cities that are over 25 degrees and then filter out only that part of information and pack it in one command. It’s all individual MCP calls I cannot script it. 

CLI is more efficient than MCP. I still remember my friend and hacker Tomnomnom and his epic arsenal of bash scripts.

Related to CLI and OpenClaw, the recent timing of KiloCode's CLI 1.0 was quite prescient! From their launch blog:

Most AI coding tools today are built around narrow assumptions: a single editor, a single model provider, or a closed stack that works best inside one product ecosystem. That approach breaks down in real-world engineering, where developers constantly move between interfaces.

The terminal remains the most universal environment in software development. It’s where engineers SSH into servers, diagnose failures, and operate when higher-level tools fall away. As agentic workflows become part of daily engineering work, they need to live in the terminal, not just inside an IDE.

The Kilo team even brought Lobster to the SF clawdbot meetup yesterday. Well played.

You could build the next clawdbot

There's been lots of good thoughts on what Clawdbot means and in many ways it's a demo to show what's possible.

But I want to touch lastly on this fact: Peter was "out of the game" for three years. He sold his company and was burnt out so he was basically in early retirement. When he came back into coding and building about a year ago, he had fresh eyes and fresh passion. I love that! It took a single developer who had barely touched a terminal for almost three years to come and innovate and capture people's imaginations and minds. He built what Siri should be.

Never underestimate what a single person can do! Never underestimate what you can do!

Notes:

1. Keep in mind this video with Peter is about three weeks old. At one point he jokes about being a human merge button. With the project going from 100 github stars to 3,300 he had already merged 500 PRs. BTW, now his project is the fastest growing OSS project ever (It's up over 100K github stars by now).
2. I dont think Peter is dissing on MCP. He still uses it and supports it. He just has an opinionated perspective on what works for what he built and how CLI > MCP.
3. Disclosure: I'm an investor in KiloCode.