What if you don’t need MCP at all?

Mario Zechner, creator of Pi which is the agent inside OpenClaw: I’m a simple boy, so I like simple things. Agents can run Bash and write code well. Bash and code are composable. So what’s simpler than having your agent just invoke CLI tools and write code? This is nothing new. We’ve all been doing this since the beginning. I’d just like to convince you that in many situations, you don’t need or even want an MCP server. Let me illustrate this with a common MCP server use case: browser dev tools. Mario proceeds to use Puppeteer Core to create the composable tools he needs with minimal token overhead. I am still asked why I often skip MCP integrations in mid-2026. I’ll start referring folks to Mario’s thoughts on it: inefficient, hard to extend, and not composable. Simple is good. Source