apideck.com
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Apideck published hard numbers on how MCP server tool definitions eat context windows – one setup with GitHub, Slack, and Sentry consumed 55,000 tokens before a single user message, and a broader test showed 143,000 of 200,000 tokens gone on schema alone. Scalekit benchmarks found MCP using 4 to 32x more tokens than CLI equivalents for identical tasks. Apideck’s alternative is a CLI with progressive disclosure: an 80-token system prompt replaces tens of thousands of upfront definitions, and agents discover capabilities incrementally via –help. A single accounting query costs around 400 tokens versus 10,000+ with MCP. The debate over MCP’s overhead has been building for weeks, with Charles Chen and Garry Tan on opposite sides – Apideck just added the clearest token-level evidence yet.
