7.7Interview Talking Point

"We evaluated both MCP and CLI-skill approaches for browser automation. The key trade-off is where page state goes. MCP streams tool schemas and accessibility trees into the model context on every action; the Playwright CLI writes the same accessibility snapshots to disk as YAML, and the agent reads them only when it needs to — interacting via stable element refs. Microsoft's own benchmark puts a typical task at about 27k tokens via CLI versus 114k via MCP, roughly a 4x saving, and they now recommend the CLI for coding agents. We use the CLI as the primary interface wherever the agent has filesystem access, and keep Playwright MCP for sandboxed environments that don't. It's the same Playwright engine either way — since browser.bind() they can even share one browser."