👀 Everyone’s hyping MCP servers, but have you ever actually looked at the token burn? A simple GitHub interaction over MCP can chew through ~23k tokens before you’ve even done anything interesting. Compare that to a tight CLI integration calling the GitHub API directly: no schema negotiation overhead, no verbose tool descriptions, no back-and-forth context bloat — just structured input, structured output, done. When you’re building serious AI systems, token efficiency isn’t cosmetic, it’s architectural. Fewer tokens means lower latency, lower cost, and less hallucination surface area. MCP has its place for standardised tool ecosystems, but if you care about performance at scale, lean CLI pipelines are often the smart choice.

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