I've been using a scoring system for website analysis that's essentially a decision tree under the hood. Does the site have a meta description? Does it load in under 3 seconds? Is it mobile responsive? Each check produces a score, the tree aggregates them. Users understand why they got their score because the logic is transparent.

Try explaining why a neural network rated their website 73/100. Decision trees make that trivial.

I recently helped a family member set up a new phone and it took over 2 hours. Between 2FA migrations, app re-authentication, and trying to figure out which backup actually had their data, it was miserable.

Phone manufacturers have zero incentive to make cross-platform migration easy. Apple wants you to stay on iPhone. Google wants you to stay on Android. The user suffers.

One thing I've found: even with XML tags, you still need to validate and parse defensively. Models will occasionally nest tags wrong, omit closing tags, or hallucinate new tag names. Having a fallback parser that extracts content even from malformed XML has saved me more than once.

The real win is that XML tags give you a natural way to do few-shot prompting with structure. You can show the model exactly what shape the output should take, and it follows remarkably well.

MCP shines when you need stateful, multi-step interactions - things like browsing a codebase, running tests iteratively, or managing deployment pipelines where each step depends on the last.

CLI wins when the task is well-defined and atomic. "Run this audit", "deploy this thing", "format this file." No ambiguity, no state to maintain.

The trap I see people falling into: using MCP for everything because it's new and shiny, when a simple CLI wrapper would be faster, more reliable, and easier to debug. The best tools I've built combine both - CLI for the happy path, MCP for the exploratory/interactive path.