The MCP tax is real. CLI is not a cope.

Playwright’s own CLI-versus-MCP writeup — quoted in Chrome DevTools MCP issue #797 — is the tax, not a vibe: CLI skips large tool schemas and verbose accessibility trees; MCP loads the menu before you act. Paul Irish’s side of that debate is a CLI escape hatch, not a claim that MCP is finished. Add four servers and most of the window is a catalog of tools the agent barely knows.

CLI is winning the cheap path because the model already knows grep, gh, and psql. MCP still wins when the job is OAuth, a browser, or a tool the model has never seen. The hybrid is the honest stack: CLI for high-frequency local work, MCP when the assistant has to be a tool user, not a text box. Crush is a Charm TUI that still loads MCP over http/stdio/sse — it is not CLI-instead-of-MCP.

Measure the tax, then pick. Do not quote Chrome’s README as a token-tax paper; it only says a CLI exists, and the official CLI docs call that CLI experimental. The Node catch is engines, not marketing LTS: chrome-devtools-mcp@1.8.0 engines “^20.19.0 || ^22.12.0 || >=23”. 20.16 and 20.17 fail; 20.19 LTS is in engines; “Node ≥ 22.12” and “Node 20 fails” are both too blunt. Gemini CLI’s consumer cutoff is 2026-06-18 — enterprise and API keys stay; Antigravity CLI is the successor, not 1:1. Crush is FSL-1.1-MIT: competing-use restriction, MIT after two years, not OSI. The trend is not “pick a protocol.”