curl for MCP: Why Coding Agents Are Happier Using the CLI
I've been thinking a lot about how coding agents interact with external services. At Arcade, we build agentic tools, so I spend most of my days watching AI agents try to do real things in the real world. And one pattern keeps bugging me. We're building increasingly complex integrations to connect coding agents to MCP servers. Custom SDKs, persistent connections, elaborate client configurations. But here's the thing: these agents already know how to use the CLI. They've been trained on millions of shell sessions. curl, git, docker, npm. They know the patterns. Flags, stdin, stdout, pipes, exit codes it's all in there. So why are we teaching them a new interface?
