[foota]

Does tool calling in general bloat context, or is there something particular about MCP?

One thing I have read recently is that when you make a tool call it forces the model to go back to the agent. The effect of this is that the agent then has to make another request with all of the prompt (include past messages), these will be "cached" tokens, but they're still expensive. So if you can amortize the tool calls by having the model either do many at once or chaining them with something like bash you'll be better off.

I suspect this might be why cursor likes writing bash scripts so much, simple shell commands are going to be very token heavy because of the frequency of interrupts.

[theshrike79]

MCPs are like a wall full of tools in an already crowded workshop, you can easily access everything but they're also in the way if you need the space for something else.

Skills are like boxes on shelves with a note of "open this if you want to create or edit PDFs", they take way less space and you only open them when you need the contents.

As for tools, harnesses in general don't usually have many of those, maybe 6-10 for reading/writing/searching/web in total.

[CuriouslyC]

MCP includes tool definitions in context, whereas models just "know" shell commands and common language tools.

[foota]

Hm.. but that's just tool calling, right? MCP is just that there's a lot more tools than normal.