Why I chose a CLI over MCP for my Dev Tool

MCP is everywhere right now. If you are building any kind of developer tool that talks to AI agents, the default assumption is that you should build an MCP server. Every major agent platform already supports it, including Cursor, Claude Desktop, and VS Code, and the ecosystem is growing fast, with the developer experience improving every month. So when I was building docmancer, a tool that gives AI coding agents access to up-to-date documentation, MCP was the obvious integration path. I prototyped it, tested it across a few agents, and then deliberately decided to go in a completely different direction. I shipped plain CLI commands and markdown skill files instead. MCP, as a protocol, isn't all bad. It is a well-designed protocol with real strengths. But for what I was building, MCP introduced problems that a simpler architecture did not, and the benefits it offered were ones I could achieve without it. I'll walk through the reasoning because it applies to a broader class of developer