YC leader blasts MCP: "Honestly, it's garbage," Perplexity CTO also announced internally to abandon it in favor of API and CLI

Crypto World News reports that according to 1M AI News monitoring, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan posted that the Model Context Protocol (MCP) led by Anthropic is “honestly just garbage,” citing three main issues: occupying too much context window, requiring manual toggling repeatedly, and poor authentication experience. He said he spent 30 minutes that evening writing an AI-generated 100-line Playwright CLI wrapper, which performed 100 times better than accessing Chrome through MCP. After finishing, he found that Vercel had already done the same thing. Tan retweeted another tweet mentioning that Perplexity co-founder and CTO Denis Yarats internally stated that the company is shifting from MCP to direct API and CLI usage. The debate between MCP and CLI has been heating up in the developer community recently. Technical analysis indicates that connecting to a standard GitHub MCP server injects about 55,000 tokens into the context (tool-defined only), which easily hits the context window limit in long conversations. As of March 2026, FastMCP tracked over 1,800 MCP servers (compared to only 425 in August 2025). The advantage of MCP lies in tool discovery and standardized interfaces, but for programming agents with terminal access, directly calling CLI tools offers better token efficiency and composability.