[steve_adams_86]

My success with LLMs has increased quite a bit since I stopped using MCP servers. I credit it to a couple things:

One, far less context usage Two, I replace it with better instructions to use the tools available.

The gist of it for me is that MCP is expensive and doesn't make up for better instructions using lighter weight tools.

Like the article mentions too, when you've got good tools available in the shell and good instructions for how to use them, the tokens required to do significant workloads is dramatically reduced specifically because the composability of tools in that environment is essentially unprecedented in computing.

In the rare case that Claude doesn't figure out good workflows on its own, you can just make a skill or add instructions to CLAUDE.md and the results are remarkably good