Youre right and there are some assumptions being made here around the agent having enough context to work on a task without interrupts (e.g. team review, asking questions, etc).
Typically human equivalent time is based on a single person given all the potential information they need up front (which is not today how a lot of work is done).
IMO MCP isn't totally dead, but its role has shrunk. Quoting from my post [1]:
"Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway... MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way."
You still need some standard to hook up data to agents esp when the agents are not running on your local dev machine. I don't think e.g. REST/etc are nearly specific enough to do this without a more constrained standard for requests.
Hooks can also be useful for this. If it's using the wrong APIs then can hint on write or block on commit with some lint function that checks for this.
Yeah I started with Cursor, went hybrid, and then in the last month or so I've totally swapped over.
Part of it is the snappy more minimal UX but also just pure efficacy seems consistently better. Claude does its best work in CC. I'm sure the same is true of Codex.
Yeah if that's possible or you are willing to build it, that's the right solution. Today pretty much all of my integrations are pure CLIs like that rather than MCPs.
You can do anything you want via a CLI but MCP still exists as a standard that folks and platforms might want to adopt as a common interface.
Often code in SaaS companies like ours is indeed how we solve customer problems. It's not so much the amount of code but the rate (code per time) we can effectively use to solve problems/build solutions. AI, when tuned correctly, lets us do this faster than ever possible before.
Makes sense. I work for a growth stage startup and most of these apply to our internal mono repo so hard to share specifics. We use this for both new and legacy code each with their own unique AI coding challenges.
If theres enough interest, I might replicate some examples in an open source project.
https://gist.github.com/sshh12/f2c402db02eb00982100f645519bd...