[brookst]

You’ve described a naive MCP implementation but it really doesn’t work that way IRL.

I have an MCP server with ~120 functions and probably 500k tokens worth of help and documentation that models download.

But not all at once, that would be crazy. A good MCP tool is hierarchical, with a very short intro, links to well-structured docs that the model can request small pieces of, groups of functions with `—-help` params that explain how to use each one, and agent-friendly hints for grouping often-sequential calls together.

It’s a similar optimization to what you’re talking about with CLI; I’d argue that transport doesn’t really matter.

There are bad MCP serves that dump 150k tokens of instructions at init, but that’s a bad implementation, not intrinsic to the interface.