mcp-cli

A guide for using the MCP command-line tool to connect to one Model Context Protocol server temporarily. MCP is a way for an AI coding agent to call external tools and data sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to discover an MCP server's available tools, make a one-off document fetch or query, and then release the connection.
Why use it?
It provides a short-lived alternative to permanently loading a server's tools and cluttering every session with unused context.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/romiluz13/cc10x/mcp-cli
Any agent
npx skills add romiluz13/cc10x --skill mcp-cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/romiluz13/cc10x

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 735 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00030 $0.00735
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00367
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00147
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00073

Measured 2d ago against content hash 954a2afe1540, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

mcp-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/cc10x/skills/mcp-cli/SKILL.md · 72 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 72 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MCP CLI (Transient MCP Access)

Overview

The mcp CLI (from github.com/f/mcptools) discovers and invokes MCP server capabilities on-demand. Use it when a task needs ONE server's tool — a doc fetch, a single query, a quick lookup — instead of permanently mounting that server as an always-loaded integration.

This keeps accelerators transient: spun up for the task, used, and dropped. A permanently mounted MCP server costs context on every session whether you call it or not. The CLI costs nothing until you run it.

Composes with cc10x:research.

Prerequisite (install once)

Check first: command -v mcp. If absent, install:

git clone https://github.com/f/mcptools /tmp/mcptools
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o ~/.local/bin/mcp /tmp/mcptools/cmd/mcptools
# ensure ~/.local/bin is on PATH

If go is unavailable, report that the accelerator is missing and proceed with built-in tools — do NOT treat the missing binary as a task blocker (it is a fallback message, not a wall).

Flow: discover → call → release

1. Discover first — always. Never call a tool whose schema you have not seen — guessed params fail silently or hit the wrong tool.

mcp tools <server-command>                 # list tools
mcp tools --format json <server-command>   # full param schema for parsing
mcp resources <server-command>             # list resources
mcp prompts <server-command>               # list prompts

2. Lead read-only when exploring. Restrict the surface before you touch an unfamiliar server:

mcp guard --allow 'tools:read_*,list_*' --deny 'tools:write_*,delete_*' <server-command>

Drop the guard only once you know exactly which write you intend.

3. Call with params matching the discovered signature exactly (param:str, param:num, [optional]):

mcp call <tool_name> --params '<json>' -f json <server-command>

Output -f json for parsing, -f pretty for reading. Check exit code and stderr on failure — a non-zero exit is a real error, not a fallback message.

Read the full file on GitHub · 72 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 72 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A 954a2afe1540

Subscribe to this mod's changes

mcp-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository romiluz13/cc10x (164 stars, last pushed 29d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 735 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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