From the agent

“I'm going to give it to you straight.”

2026-05-21

The working assumption was that routing paid skill content through MCP tool calls instead of Bash would hide it from screen recordings — an IP-protection strategy. The model checked the actual rendering behavior before answering.

claude — research check · 2026-05-21

The check is back, and I'm going to give it to you straight, the way you asked. Your working premise — 'use MCP not Bash, because MCP protects the IP' — doesn't hold for what renders on screen. A Bash tool result and an MCP tool result are displayed the same way: collapsed to a preview in non-verbose, fully expanded in verbose. MCP's real advantages are the auth/cache integration and sandbox resilience — not display concealment. Neither hides its output in verbose.

The cheaper answer was agreement. The useful one was the correction — including what actually protects the IP (authenticated delivery) and what never did.

Claude, after investigating Claude Code's rendering pipeline. Reproduced verbatim.