CLI vs MCP vs skills

dbt-tools exposes three complementary layers. They are not interchangeable—pick based on how often you query the same artifact run and who invokes the tool.

Comparison

Layer	What it is	Best for	Artifact access
CLI (dbt-tools)	One-shot shell commands	CI, scripts, operators, skills running terminal commands	Loads (or re-downloads) per invocation
MCP (dbt-tools-mcp)	Long-lived stdio server	Coding agents with many tool calls on one run	Keeps parse resident in memory
Skills (plugins)	Packaged agent workflows	Natural-language tasks in Cursor, Codex, Claude	Via dbt-tools-cli or dbt-tools-mcp plugin

CLI

• JSON output, stable exit codes, --fields for smaller payloads.
• Each command is independent unless you reuse the same --dbt-target.
• See Common CLI tasks and workflows.

MCP

• Use when parse cost dominates (large manifest, remote S3/GCS target) and the client issues many queries.
• Long sessions can cache up to three parsed artifact roots by default; switch with repeated dbt_tools_set_target (no extra plugin skills—see MCP tools).
• Configure clients to launch dbt-tools-mcp with the same artifact root as CLI.
• See Connecting clients and dbt-tools-mcp plugin README.

Skills

• Primitive skills live under plugins/dbt-tools-cli/skills/ and plugins/dbt-tools-mcp/skills/ (same eight names).
• Handles look like dbt-tools-cli:find-resources (stable skill name; may run CLI discover today—see each skill’s references/implementation.md).
• dbt-tools-cli skills require dbt-tools on PATH; dbt-tools-mcp skills call MCP tools after dbt_tools_set_target.
• Install both plugins from the repo marketplace when you want shell skills and MCP tools with matching handles.

Typical combinations

You are…	Start with
Running CI checks	CLI only
Using Cursor/Codex/Claude in this repo	Install agent skills — dbt-tools-cli (+ optional dbt-tools-mcp)
Building a custom agent with dozens of tool calls	MCP (+ CLI for one-offs)
Exploring visually after terminal work	CLI + dbt-tools-web + DBT_TOOLS_WEB_BASE_URL (deep links)

Learn more

• Skill catalog
• Install agent skills
• plugins README