mcp-cli Tool

Skill by ara.so — MCP Skills collection.

Overview

mcp-cli is a lightweight, Bun-based CLI for interacting with MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. It provides:

• On-demand schema loading - Only fetch tool schemas when needed, saving AI context tokens
• Shell composability - JSON output for piping with jq, chaining, and scripting
• Connection pooling - Lazy-spawn daemon keeps connections warm (60s idle timeout)
• Universal support - Works with both stdio and HTTP MCP servers
• Tool filtering - Allow/disable specific tools per server via config

Use cases:

• AI agents accessing MCP tools without loading full schemas into context
• Shell scripts automating MCP server interactions
• Discovering and exploring available MCP capabilities