Nice to see this space explored! There are definitely pros/cons to both the julia-mcp and this kind of standalone CLI tool approach. The main tradeoff is:
- MCP: (+) no lifecycle/lingering daemons to manage, julia sessions are scoped to AI sessions, naturally handles multiple independent sessions per julia env, works on all OS; (-) AI-specific, infeasible to use from outside.
- standalone CLI: (+) benefits all of AI / users / scripts equally, can be used anywhere; (-) necessary to have long-running background processes, need special plumbing to get multiple independent julia sessions for the same folder.
I don’t know if it’s possible to somehow get best of both worlds… 
// also cc @tecosaur who worked on something similar recently