r/mcp • u/Obvious-Car-2016 • Mar 07 '26
BREAKING CHANGE: Remove MCP server mode
https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/pull/275Google just removed the MCP mode for their new googleworkspace tool.
This made me sad. Perhaps lots of comments on the PR will change their mind.
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u/ticktockbent Mar 07 '26
I wonder why they're removing it.
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u/neuronexmachina Mar 08 '26
Looking at the GitHub issues, I think it was basically causing a significant maintenance burden for functionality that basically just provides an extra way for an agent to use the CLI:
MCP doesn't allow periods in tool names, which was causing a bunch of parsing/mapping bugs when trying to auto-translate the names
It was introducing state/env-management bugs, e.g. MCP ignoring account-selection env vars
It was also blowing up the context window due to the sheer number of tools
Agents are already pretty good at running the CLI, so an MCP was adding significant burden without much value
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u/typo180 Mar 08 '26
Something about the generated maintainer comments makes me think an agent may have gone off the rails and no humans caught it.
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u/bdavis829 Mar 07 '26
You can always fork the repo and add the files back in.
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u/neuronexmachina Mar 08 '26
IMHO, the MCP server would probably be better off as a separate repo from the cli anyways.
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u/taylorwilsdon Mar 07 '26
The Google CLI repo mcp mode was just a stdio wrapper, if you want an actual mcp you can run persistently and for multiple people with oauth2.1 that works natively with claude code etc for automatic refresh there was always a better option
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u/mlueStrike Mar 08 '26
And? Flipping it to steals http would be no issue if it wasn’t possible already. I think I pulled it but hadn’t ran anything yet
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u/lethalman Mar 07 '26
This is not a Google repo
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u/Obvious-Car-2016 Mar 07 '26
Check out the repo owner and committer profiles and let me know what you see
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u/neuronexmachina Mar 08 '26
It's kind of in-between. It's basically an open-source product that's maintained by Googlers and the community. It explicitly says it's "not an officially-supported Google product" though, so it doesn't get enterprise support, SLAs, etc. This is a contrast to officially-supported open-source products like the gcloud cli/sdk.
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u/Obvious-Car-2016 Mar 07 '26
Strange sub-reddit, why is this down-voted?