CLI vs MCP: The Wrong Debate
The Zombie Processes and the 50GB Cache
A few weeks ago, I noticed my MacBook was sluggish. I found orphaned MCP server processes that had failed to shut down cleanly — a problem Didier Durand describes vividly in his analysis [2], where users report finding over 100 zombie Node.js processes after a single session. I killed mine, freed some RAM, and went back to work.
Then last week, Brooke Jamieson — a fellow AWS Developer Advocate — published a post about running uv cache prune and freeing 75GB of disk space [9]. The culprit? Every uvx invocation from MCP servers (Kiro, Cursor, Claude Code all use them under the hood) silently caches packages, and the cache never cleans itself up. I ran the same command and got back 50GB. Fifty gigabytes of invisible MCP debt, sitting on my drive.
The Coding Agent That Doesn't Code
The Friday That Wrote Itself
Last Friday, I used a coding agent for eight hours straight. I didn’t write a single line of code.
I prepared a customer meeting by pulling context from Slack threads, calendar events, and our CRM. I researched a technical paper on geometric memory architectures and wrote a structured analysis. I collected travel expense receipts from my email — train tickets, hotel invoices, an Uber receipt forwarded from my personal phone — downloaded the PDFs, and assembled them into an expense report. I curated a reading list from articles I’d bookmarked throughout the week. I drafted the research note you’re reading the seeds of right now.