SDK vs CLI vs MCP, a dev story

An internal release-readiness tool prompted a comparison of three ways for AI agents and automation to access the GitHub API: typed SDKs, command-line interfaces, and MCP servers. The author concludes that each fits a different caller: SDKs such as Octokit suit scheduled production jobs because type checking and build-time failures improve reliability, GitHub’s gh CLI suits interactive agent sessions because it supports ad hoc commands and compact JSON output without preloading tools, and MCP is best for broad, exploratory, multi-user access because it provides discoverable structured tools and per-user authorization. MCP’s main drawback is potentially substantial context-window consumption from tool definitions, though scoping toolsets, using read-only mode, and emerging deferred tool loading can reduce this cost. Rather than treating the options as competitors, the piece recommends generating all three interfaces from a single OpenAPI specification to avoid maintenance drift, using tools such as Fern for SDK and CLI generation and Postman’s MCP Generator for an MCP server, while emphasizing structured CLI output, read-only permissions, and careful measurement of MCP token overhead.

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