MCP, CLI, Agent Skill, or Custom Tool?

Hosted by Isaac Flath and Hamel Husain

Wed, Jun 3, 2026

7:00 PM UTC (45 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI Evals For Engineers & PMs
Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar
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What you'll learn

Always pick the right agent wrapper

Five questions to choose MCP, CLI, skill, or custom tool for any workflow.

See where MCP, CLI, skills, and tools actually fit

Match workflow shape to delivery mode: install friction, live data, writes, approvals.

Ship your product into the user's agent

Meet users where they are. Increasingly, the expectation is Codex, Claude, etc can drive your product.

Why this topic matters

MCP, CLI, agent skill, or custom tool? It's the question I keep getting asked, and the hype answer (MCP, obviously) is usually wrong. Each choice quietly decides where code runs, where state lives, and who approves changes. Isaac and I walk through how we actually decide, so you stop shipping the wrong shape of thing and your users actually use what you build.

You'll learn from

Isaac Flath

Independent Developer & Consultant

Isaac is an independent consultant who has helped many companies incorporate AI into their products. I've taught AI efficiency to companies for years and worked for tech startups and cutting edge labs.


As a consultant, I have helped companies of all sizes from startups (such as Ankihub and SpecStory) to enterprise clients (such as Travel & Leisure and Cable and Wireless Communications). Previously, I worked as a researcher at Novetta where I worked on Chatbots, and worked at other cutting edge labs such as Answer AI.

Hamel Husain

ML Engineer with 20 years of experience.

Hamel Husain is a ML Engineer with over 20 years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.

See all products from Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar

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