I Made MCP 94% Cheaper (And It Only Took One Command)
Summary
The article compares MCP and CLI for loading tool catalogs in AI agents, showing that preloading complete tool schemas (MCP) incurs significantly higher token costs than the lazy-loading approach (CLI). It provides quantitative examples across session starts and tool calls, highlights the token savings (often ~90%+ with CLI), and discusses Anthropic's Tool Search as a related approach. It also introduces CLIHub as a way to generate CLIs from MCPs, framing these findings as practical guidance for building cost-efficient AI automation workflows in business contexts.