Stop Giving Your AI Agents Root Shell

Here&rsquo;s a question I got asked recently: If a skill can already call a REST API using Bash, why bother with MCP? The surface-level answer is &ldquo;MCP is cleaner.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s not wrong, but it undersells what&rsquo;s actually different - and I think it&rsquo;s a genuinely useful distinction to understand if you&rsquo;re serious about building reliable agent workflows. Also,…