MCP Token Tax Hits Agent Budgets // AIDRAN

The MCP overhead problem is structural, not incidental. Every agent invocation that touches an MCP server injects the full tool catalog into context—a design decision that made sense for discovery but becomes punishing at scale. The per connection; chain three services and the overhead alone exceeds what most task prompts require. Teams that ran the numbers found CLI tools restored that cost by 96–99%, not because CLI is architecturally superior in every dimension, but because it does not front-load the entire…

The MCP Token Tax Is Real—and CLI Tools Are Collecting the Refund

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