---
title: "MCP doesn’t suck — your agent does"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-07-01"
time: "1:55pm-2:15pm"
track: "Expo Stage 2 NW"
room: "Expo Stage 2 NW"
speakers: ["Jan Curn"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: ""
scheduleRoom: "Expo Stage 2 NW"
scheduleLabels: ["Expo Stage 2 NW", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# MCP doesn’t suck — your agent does

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 1:55pm-2:15pm
- Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 2 NW
- Speaker(s): Jan Curn
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: track TBD
- Room: Expo Stage 2 NW
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
Most AI agents misuse MCP and treat tools as prompt-time function calls: tool definitions and results are repeatedly injected into the context, tokens are wasted, and context rots. The result? Slower, less reliable agents, and the misleading conclusion that “MCP sucks, CLIs are better.” To challenge this narrative and show how agents can get the best of both MCP and CLI, at https://apify.com/ we’ve built mcpc (https://github.com/apify/mcpc), an open-source universal CLI client for MCP. It maps MCP operations to intuitive CLI commands, which agents quickly pick up through --help without external skills. It turns out, CLI is the perfect local interface for agents to interact with MCP, giving them access to full protocol capabilities including modern features like code mode or progressive tool discovery through a single Bash() tool call, while leveraging MCP’s standard remote interface for server discovery, authentication, payments, and access control. To once and for all kill the MCP vs. CLI debate and show those two technologies are not exclusive but complementary, we’ll present evals comparing performance of agents using naive MCP, modern MCP, native CLIs, other MCP CLIs, and mcpc, in various real-world scenarios.

## Media Evidence
[The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blW-lSd5CYQ) (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

- Source video: `youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ`
- Slide deck: [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-dense-slides|Dense Slides: The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify]] — 7 visible slide image(s); 7 HTML recreation(s).
![[assets/dense-slides/blW-lSd5CYQ/slide-001.jpg]]
![[assets/dense-slides/blW-lSd5CYQ/slide-002.jpg]]
![[assets/dense-slides/blW-lSd5CYQ/slide-003.jpg]]
- Additional slide evidence: [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-slides|Slides: The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify]], [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-reconstructed-slides|Reconstructed Slides: The rise of the agentic economy on the shoulders of MCP — Jan Curn, Apify]]
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ`: google, maps, intelligence, emerge, runs, actors, compass, data.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
- `youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ` — 9 slide-derived text signals
- Slide-derived themes for `youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ`: google, maps, intelligence, emerge, runs, actors, compass, data.
- Evidence links for `youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ`: [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ]], [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-slides]], [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-dense-slides]], [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-reconstructed-slides]]

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

## People
- [[jan-curn]]

## Supporting Slides
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-slides]] — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.

## Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-dense-slides]] (7 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-dense-slides]]
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-reconstructed-slides]]
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-slides]]
- Slide-derived terms: `scraper`, `actor`, `google`, `maps`, `email`, `extract`, `form`, `world`, `sfair`, `apify`, `details`, `posts`, `intelligence`, `emerge`, `tool`, `runs`, `instagram`, `contact`

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# MCP doesn’t suck — your agent does ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 1:55pm-2:15pm - Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 2 NW - Speaker(s): Jan Curn - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: track TBD - Room: Expo Stage 2 NW - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Most AI agents misuse MCP and treat tools as prompt-time function calls: tool definitions and results are repeatedly injected into the context, tokens are wasted, and context rots. The result? Slower, less reliable agents, and the misleading conclusion that “MCP sucks, CLIs are better.” To challenge this narrative and show how agents can get the best of both MCP and CLI, at https://apify.com/ we’ve built mcpc (https://github.com/apify/mcpc), an open-source universal CLI client for MCP. It maps MCP operations to intuitive CLI commands, which agents quickly pick up through --help without external skills.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[jan-curn|Jan Curn]] — Founder & CEO at [[apify|Apify]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agent-security]]
- [[agentic-search]]
- [[coding-agents]]
- [[mcp]]

### Derived Links And Source Material
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ]] — related YouTube source page.
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-reconstructed-slides]] — slide evidence.
- [[youtube-blW-lSd5CYQ-dense-slides]] — slide evidence.

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.