The Scaffolding Matters More Than the Interface: A Controlled Comparison of MCP and CLI Tool Use Across Seven Agent Scaffoldings, Five Language Models, and One Software Task

Marc Alier Forment, María José Casañ Guerrero, Francisco José García-Peñalvo +1

How much an AI coding agent costs to run can depend more on the agent scaffolding that drives it than on the interface through which it reaches its tools. We set out to measure the…